Like a House Falling into the Sea
by Unknown Kadath
Summary: The Doctor thought he’d escaped his destiny, but on a planet called Avarinne, under the long shadow of the Time War, he learns just how mistaken he was.
1. Chapter 1: The Storm

**Title: Like a House Falling into the Sea 1/5?—The Storm**

**Series: The Abyss: a brief history of the Time War. "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Friedrich Nietzsche **

Author: Unknown Kadath (aka kadath_or_bust)

Beta: ChellusAuglerie

Word Count: 5,334

Rating: T

Characters: 8th Doctor, Destrii, 9th Doctor in future chapter

Genre: Adventure, Drama

Summary: The Doctor thought he'd escaped his destiny, but on a planet called Avarinne, under the long shadow of the Time War, he learns just how mistaken he was.

Disclaimer: Well, I own Avarinne … that's about it. Destrii isn't mine, either. See spoiler alert.

**Spoiler Alert!—**for _Oblivion_ and _The Flood_. From whence comes Destrii, but hopefully it'll make enough sense even if you haven't read those.

**Author's Note:** I always swore I would never write stories about the Time War. (To myself. It would be even more embarrassing if I'd promised someone else.) But then, I always said the same thing about post-_Journey's End_ fic, and I've got a whole damned series I'm working on for that.

I figure I'd better work on this before the next season airs, in case Mr. Moffat decides to start telling war stories and contradicts all the fun ideas I've had. Or comes up with similar ideas himself—I've had fics derailed both ways in the past. (One of the reasons I swore off writing fics for shows before they get cancelled. Like I'm doing now. Sigh.)

This is both the prologue and the epilogue (and probably an interlude) to a trilogy I never intended to write about the War. (Hey, it's a Time War. These things happen.)

The rest of the trilogy will probably consist of one story that takes place in a single day, one story that takes place both before and after that story, and a final story that will be so chronologically deranged I do not know where to begin describing it. I know where I'll start writing it, though—smack in the middle.

All of these stories can probably be read alone or out of order without losing anything—except, possibly, the last. In the unlikely event that the last story requires knowledge of the others, I'll add a note to the beginning of it.

So, without further ado, here is my prologue/interlude/epilogue. It's turned into a mad sort of Joseph Campbell thing, with monsters and labyrinths and heroes, but then, doesn't everything?

**Like A House Falling Into The Sea**

**Part One: The Storm**

"_X will mark the place_

_Like a parting of the waves_

_Like a house falling into the sea_

_Into the sea_"

Radiohead, "Where I End and You Begin"

**1. Destriianatos**

I was born on a world called Oblivion, but I've only ever known one home in my life, and that's Avarinne. Even growing up on Oblivion, when I called it my home, I didn't really feel that way. I hated it. It was more hell than home, and the only love I ever got was lies.

I've lived different places, between Oblivion and Avarinne. Called some of them home, too. What makes a home, anyway? Is it just the place you happen to grow up in, some random patch of ground where you got born? Cos that's Oblivion. Just a load of dirt. Or is it someplace that makes you who you are? Well, that's everywhere, then.

It's not just the place you like to be. I liked the _Salvation._ And I liked the TARDIS. Liked a few other places, too. But they're not home. Well—the TARDIS could have been, maybe, if things had gone differently. Or could it? Maybe it wasn't the TARDIS. Maybe it was just the Doctor, and the traveling.

No. Home is the place that makes you feel complete every time you come back to it. Home is the place you carry with you whenever you leave it. Home is the place you want your children to be born.

Home is where you want to go to die, so it's the last thing your eyes ever see.

I was lucky. I found a home. I got all of those things. How many people go through life never knowing what a home is?

It started as just another adventure. Yeah, sure, I thought Avarinne was beautiful. The first time I saw it, when I stepped out of the TARDIS door and saw the shell-pink sand stretching down to the clear amethyst water under the pale green sky, I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. It was warm and quiet, and the breeze carried the scent of salt and tropical blooms.

Back then I thought it was just one of a million beautiful things I was gonna see. I thought I was gonna see this stuff every day.

Me and the Doctor.

**2. Oh, No, Here We Go Again**

"This keeps happening to you, Doctor. _You_, not me. It's not my fault."

"I'm not trying to apportion blame, Destrii. As such. I'm merely suggesting that referring to an admittedly obese local leader as 'the Pillsbury Doughboy' might be a slight lapse in discretion."

"Oh, come on. We're a million light-years from Earth. Probably a million years, too—"

"We don't know that!"

"Well, we would if the TARDIS sensors were actually _working_. Anyway, this lot don't even have radios. No way do they know what it meant."

"I'm sure they could tell your tone of voice was disrespectful. And since you called him 'lard-butt' in your next sentence—"

"His guards were groping me!"

"It was a perfectly ordinary weapons search. And it's no excuse for hitting people."

"Oh, I'm just supposed to take it, huh? Let them push me around? Smile and make nice?"

"Hm, let's see. With heavily armed thugs? Yes!"

"And what if they'd decided to lock us up anyway? Y'know, if you'd let me carry weapons, we wouldn't be here."

"Yes, we could have been shot, instead."

"Yeah, cos slow execution is _sooo_ much better."

"I don't see what you're complaining about. You're not the one who's going to drown when the tide comes in."

"No, I'll just starve slowly. Hey, haven't you picked your manacles yet?"

"It's rather difficult, with these primitive locking mechanisms! And it isn't as if I've got a proper lock-pick. What about yours? You said you were good at locks."

"They're really rusty. And they're at a bad angle."

"Well, for goodness' sake, hurry up. The water's almost up to the pocket where I keep my jelly babies."

"Never mind your jelly babies, what about my leather jacket? It's ruined!"

And then—perfect end to a perfect day—we got kidnapped by fish-men.

**3. Not At Home**

The morning had started out as usual. He'd been darting around the console, hitting buttons and flipping switches and talking a mile a minute about something or other—I think it was some music group called the Beatles he wanted to take me to see. He was wearing a green velvet jacket, just like the one he'd had when I first met him. (He'd swapped it for blue, for a bit, but that one got toasted a few adventures back. The man travels all through history having adventures, but he won't take a chance and do something new with his wardrobe.)

The interior of the TARDIS (back then, anyway) was this vast sort of steam-punk cathedral, with a hologram ceiling and dark wood and heavy metal struts. It had a Jules Verne control console in the center, and the walls were lined with antiques and futuristic gizmos. One of the lights on the console was blinking insistently.

"Is that supposed to be blinking?" I asked.

The Doctor paused. "No," he said, in a clipped voice I'd rarely heard him use. He reached over and hit a button, and the blinking stopped.

"What was that?"

"That was for incoming communications."

"Somebody you don't want to talk to, huh?" He seemed kind of cranky about it.

"You might say that." Then he muttered something about interfering busybodies (which was rich, considering the source) and somebody wanting him to stop the decline and fall of the Roman Empire last time they called. Whatever a Roman is.

Then he shook off his irritation and gave me a bright smile. "But never mind them! How would you like to see the Beatles?"

"Beatles?" I said. "Why would I want to see a bunch of bugs?"

"They're not bugs," he explained. "They're men. They're just named after bugs."

"So why would men call themselves bugs?"

He stopped in mid-dart. "Do you know, I haven't a clue? Let's go ask! 1960's, what do you say?"

"Yeah, whatever. Listen, can we go meet Leonard Nimoy while we're there?"

"Well, technically, we shouldn't. I mean, that's not the point of time travel, going around meeting famous people." Which was rich, coming from him. From the way he talks, he never does anything else. But then a wild grin lit up his face. "But then, what's the point of time travel if you _can't_ meet a few celebrities, eh?"

He turned and gave a dial a decisive twist, then did a double take and stared a readout. "Oh, dear," he said, frowning. "Now what on earth …"

The TARDIS rocked. "What's that?" I asked. "Have you gone and hit something?"

"No …" He frowned. For a moment I thought he looked really upset, maybe even scared, but then he just looked a little puzzled and I figured I'd imagined it. After all, he never looked scared of anything. "There's some sort of temporal turbulence here. We've been thrown off course. I'm going to set us down somewhere so we can get our bearing. We can see the Beatles later."

I peered at the readouts, hoping he was fussing over nothing, but there was a really nasty gravity anomaly out there, twisting through the dimensions. Sigh. Destrii and the Doctor to the rescue, again.

He landed us in some shrubbery just above a beach, on a little deserted island. We saw some smoke off in the distance, waded across a narrow channel, and walked until we came to the guard outpost.

The rest, as they say, was … par for the course.

**4. Rescue—Uh, Sort Of**

"Uh, Doctor?" I whispered.

"Yes?" The Doctor shook his head, trying to get his wayward curls out of his eyes. Back then he was a slender man in a green jacket who looked like a mad poet. Or someone who wanted to be a mad poet. I suppose he was, sort of. He was cute, in a pale, slightly old-fashioned way, but he always started whinging whenever I tried to kiss him.

"I think we got company." I nodded to the gently lapping water.

There were two forms coming out of the shadows of the coral. They looked a little like the people who had captured us, the Teroi—bipedal, with webbed hands and feet, silvery hair. But they were obviously better adapted to life underwater. Their faces were elongated, with snouts a bit like a blunt dolphin's nose, and they were covered with silver scales where the Teroi had gray-brown hide. Also, the Teroi couldn't breath for long underwater. Hence the execution by drowning.

Our two visitors had more primitive clothing than the Teroi. Just loincloths (which they looked pretty good in, by the way), and belts with a few tools stuck in them. They were carrying spears.

"Oh, that's fascinating," said the Doctor. "There appear to be two sentient species on this planet. Obviously related to each other, of course."

"Of course." I started working harder on my manacles. "They don't look real friendly."

"Hm. Maybe it would be best if you didn't speak. Hello! Hello, there! I'm the Doctor, and—ahh!"

The shorter, stockier fish-man had nudged the more gangly one, who swam up and jabbed at the Doctor's ankle with his spear.

"Doctor! Doctor?" I shouted, but his head was already falling back.

"Paralytic," he gasped. "Like curare? But with a fascinating molecular similarity to …"

He trailed off, making a few last feeble attempts to speak before going completely limp. The fish-man swam at me, and I kicked out as much as the chains would allow. "Oh, no, you don't!"

He was fast, I'll give him that. I only managed to get in a few glancing blows before he jabbed me, and I'm damned good in a fight. Of course, he was armed with a long spear and I was chained up, which went a ways to evening up the odds.

**5. Captives**

The Doctor didn't shake off the drug much faster than I did. He claimed later that they must've given him a higher dose because of his higher body mass and got their sums wrong, but I think he just didn't want to admit he's not always the superior life-form in our little team. Snob.

We were paralyzed, not sedated. I was aware of everything, although as I couldn't turn my head my view was somewhat limited, and our captors didn't say much.

They took us down under the water. That didn't scare me; I have gills. But I hate being helpless. And then there was the Doctor—he needed air. You know, I used to think only weak people tried to protect each other. Turns out you need to be a lot stronger to do that than to just look out for yourself, cos a lot of the time you _can't_ help. And it hurts.

Yeah, thanks, Doc. That was something I really needed to know. Sure, it's made me a better person—big whoop. Virtue doesn't act as a painkiller.

But I didn't need to worry about him. They put us in some sort of diving-bell contraption. It was made out of some sort of leather—I'm guessing tanned bladder or stomach, stitched together with gut and sealed with resin to stop the air leaking out. Crude, but it worked well enough.

It was translucent but not transparent. I couldn't really work out where we were going, except that it wasn't to the surface. Not until the end, when we passed underneath something that blocked out the sun and came up in a little cave.

The two fish-people took us out and set us on a little rocky shelf that was the only dry land in the cave. It was of pale fossil coral, with the same golden-pink tone as the sand, full of tiny, perfect snail-shells. The low roof of the cave was the same, with light and air coming in through little chinks. It was dark and cool, the water a deep wine-purple.

There wasn't any visible way out, even before the fish-people tied us up again. The only entrance was underwater. No problem for me, if I could get out of the ropes.

I realized that I was turning my head as I looked around. Not a lot, and not very steadily, but it was movement. I glanced over at the Doctor, trying not to alert the fish-people. He gave me a quick smile, so quick I almost missed it.

"The Teroi prisoners," said the stockier fish-guy. Now that I could moved my head, I could see him a little better, even through the surface of the water. There was a flicker of movement. More fish-people, led by a big, lean one wearing a necklace of polished quartz, and a little chubby one with dull scales who was wearing an astonishing assortment of carved bones, beads and gewgaws. I figured that one had to be the local chieftain. Chieftainess. It was a little hard to tell.

The two of them, along with the stocky fish-man, came up to the rocky shelf and stuck their heads up out of the water.

"I am Threkian, Leader of the Long Kelp people of the Istoi," said the lean one with the more restrained jewelry. I figured it just went to show you never could tell. "You have violated our waters, Teroi. You have poisoned the rivers and driven us from our hunting grounds, and you must answer for those crimes. But if you aid us, we will show you mercy."

She (her voice was definitely feminine) spoke somewhat awkwardly, as if in an unfamiliar tongue, and dipped her head partly into the water afterwards, wetting her gills.

"You got the wrong people, partner," I told her, annoyed. They'd ruined my jacket for nothing. "We only just got here. And we don't know what Terroy are. Though if they're a bunch of thugs with gray skin, I can see why you don't like them."

"It's true," cut in the Doctor, struggling to raise his head against the aftereffects of the drug. "We've only just arrived on this world. We were taken prisoner and left to die—thank you for rescuing us, by the way—presumably, as my companion says, by these Teroi you're talking about, they seemed a nasty enough lot. I'm the Doctor, by the way, and this is Destriianatos. I know we've got off on the wrong foot—er, fin—but hopefully we can all be reasonable sentients about this …?"

He gave them his most charmingly innocent smile, all wide blue eyes and hopeful expression.

The fish-people were looking at both of us in surprise. "You speak Istoyen remarkably well," said Threkian, her words smoother this time. "For Teroi."

"Huh?" I said.

"TARDIS's telepathic circuits," whispered the Doctor out of the side of his mouth. "Translates for us. They think we're speaking their language." Then, to Threkian, "That's because we're not Teroi."

"Lies," said the stocky fish. "Look at them! What else could they be but Teroi?"

"Are you blind, algae-breath?" I demanded. "Look at us! Do we look like those guys?"

"They are air-breathers," said the chubby fish-man. "And the angry one's skin is like that of a Teroi. I imagine the other is an albino."

"No, we can prove it!" said the Doctor. "These Teroi, they had webbed fingers. Look at my hands. You'll see they're quite different. I even have an extra finger. And Destrii is the same."

There was a low mutter under the water. Threkian turned to the chubby fish. "Plecthros, is it so?"

"Salar!" shouted Plecthros. The gangly fish who had helped capture them darted out of the shadows. "Go have a look at their hands."

"Yes, Plecthros," said Salar. He didn't look entirely pleased about his assignment, but he pulled his body up onto the rock and gingerly reached for the Doctor. The Doctor held up his hands obligingly.

"It's true!" he called back. "Five fingers! And no webbing."

"Fascinating!" said Plecthros. (She seemed to be female, too. Odd. I thought only a man could have fashion sense that bad …) "Is there scarring?"

"No, none." He reached for my hands, hesitated at my glare, and gave me an apologetic look. I decided to humor him. After all, he was being polite. "And the other's hands are the same."

"Then they are freaks," said the stocky fish. "The other Teroi sought to kill them for it. They are a savage people. But that does not absolve these two of their crimes."

"Peace, Hirass," said Threkian. "What say you, Plecthros?"

"I have never seen such being," answered the chubby fish. "But I suppose that is the most likely answer."

"Lies will not be tolerated," said Threkian, addressing us. "You will tell us the plans of the Teroi, one way or another. Hirass, bring the caustics and the knives. Begin with the albino—I believe it is the weaker, and will break faster."

"I have them already," said Hirass, pulling a wicked-looking obsidian knife from his belt and advancing on them.

"Now wait, wait, wait, wait—" started the Doctor, voice rising.

"Hey, sushi-face!" I raised my hands to my necklace, pressing a hidden button to deactivate the hologram it projected. "Tell me I'm Teroi now!"

Threkian was the only one who stood her ground, though her body stiffened in shock. Plecthros gibbered and did a little back flip in the water. Salar gave a whistling yelp and fell backwards off the rock shelf with an almighty splash. The onlookers finned away.

"Demons!" said Hirass, surging forward with the knife. He got tangled with the fleeing Salar and gave the youth a clout on the head.

"Wait, Hirass!" barked Threkian. Hirass began to argue, still advancing on the Doctor, and Threkian surged forward and silenced him with a blow of her own. "Wait, I said! Plecthros, stop gibbering and tell me what this means."

"Salar!" said Plecthros, not coming any nearer.

"Now you've done it," muttered the Doctor.

"Done what, saved your stupid hide?" I hissed back. The projection of a terrestrial humanoid had vanished and my true form was revealed—a fish-woman, silver-blue, with scaled skin and webbed hands—but obviously more adapted to life on land than my captors.

The long-suffering Salar pulled himself back up onto the shelf. I snarled at him. "Please," he said.

"Destrii," chided the Doctor.

"All right," I grumbled. "But only for you." See the lengths I go to?

Salar's eyes went wide. I supposed he thought I was referring to him. But I let him examine me, and he remained perfectly polite.

"Well?" asked Plecthros.

Salar shook his head. "She's not Teroi."

"I can see she's not Teroi, boy, but what is she?"

"Destrii is from a world called Oblivion," said the Doctor. "And I'm a Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey. I may look like a Teroi—a little—but I assure you, I'm quite different. I have two hearts. Go on, take my pulse." A brief flicker of concern crossed his face. "Er—two hearts isn't normal for this world, is it?"

"No," said Threkian.

She waved Salar over to check the Doctor. The boy gave her a nod. His eyes had gone very wide. "Two hearts," he confirmed.

"Demons," said Hirass. I was getting really tired of him. "The two-hearted one said it himself. They come from another world!"

"No, no, we're flesh and blood like you," said the Doctor. "But we're travelers. We come from lands very far away."

They seemed to accept that. Apparently they were so primitive that not only did they not have space travel, they didn't know their own world very well. But who's complaining? It worked in our favor.

"So what do we do with them?" called a voice from the crowd of observers in the shadows.

Threkian considered. "We captured them believing them to be Teroi, our enemies. But they were only the prisoners of the Teroi. They have done nothing to wrong us. Let them go free."

This set off a storm of arguments, which the Doctor resolved by standing up and tossing aside his ropes. "Thank you, Threkian," he said. "You are indeed a wise leader."

I shook off my own ropes, a little annoyed at being upstaged and a little curious about how he'd done it. But not curious enough to ask and encourage him. "Yeah, whatever. Can we go now? I don't like this place anymore."

"Destrii, Destrii, Destrii," he sighed, "don't you think we ought to stay and try to help?"

"It's not our problem. I don't see why we have to get involved."

"First," he said patiently, "because it's the right thing to do. You've met the Teroi. There's something seriously fishy going on here."

I groaned. It didn't deter him.

"Second, there's the temporal disturbance. We still have to get to the bottom of that. And anyway, what's the point of travel if you're not going to get involved in anyth—oh …"

He put a hand to his head.

"Doc?" I asked.

"Told you not to call me …" he mumbled, and crumpled into a tangle of legs on the ground.

**6. The Storm**

I ran to his side and rolled him over onto his back. He was breathing and I couldn't see anything obviously wrong with him, but he was out cold and even whiter than usual, face screwed up in pain.

"What's wrong?" asked Salar. "Is he ill? Plecthros! The Doctor is ill!"

"I don't know," I said.

"Plecthros, go help him," ordered Threkian. But then there was a faint whispering noise outside, like wind. "No, wait! Storm! Everyone into the water!"

"Come on," said Salar. He began to pull the Doctor towards the edge of the rock shelf.

"No!" I said. "He can't breath under water!"

Salar looked around wildly. "The cage!"

"What?"

"The air balloon we brought you in. We can put him into that!"

We pulled the Doctor into the water, which got a bit of a twitch out of him but didn't wake him up, and into the diving bell with a little difficulty (he's incredibly uncoordinated when he's unconscious). The Istoi kept their heads well enough for Threkian to assign several guards to help me tow the bell with us as we fled the caves, diving deeper and deeper. I'd never been that deep under water before. All I'd known on Oblivion were pools. It was a little disorientating.

"What's going on?" I asked Salar.

"A Storm." I could hear the capital letter. "The gods are angry."

"Don't believe in gods," I said, and he gave me a scandalized look. But there was something going on, and it wasn't a normal storm. The water was vibrating, or that's what it felt like, and everything looked and sounded strange. There was a tingling like electricity and a metallic taste in the back of my mouth.

"Rock fall!" someone shouted, and we swerved to avoid a massive boulder tumbling down through the water.

We came to an area where the seafloor evened out and a great turquoise forest of kelp grew up from it. (I'm assuming it wasn't actual earth-kelp. But it looked kelp-ish, and that's how the TARDIS translated the Istoi word.) We swam into the shadows, dragging the diving bell with us, and stopped at a series of pits roofed over with woven kelp.

"Our village," explained Salar.

"Yeah, great," I said. "I'm going to check on the Doctor."

He was still unconscious. I wondered if he'd be better off on dry land. But that wasn't an option right now. Fortunately, the water was fairly warm.

Salar and Threkian (who seemed to be the only two Istoi who weren't totally useless) bullied Plecthros into checking on the Doctor. No surprise, she didn't have any answers.

"It doesn't look like the Storm-sickness," she said. "But I don't know anything about Time Lords. Time is the enemy of those with the sickness, so perhaps he is protected. Or perhaps the Storm makes him more ill?"

"What's Storm-sickness?" I asked, brushing the Doctor's damp hair away from his face. He didn't seem like he was getting any worse, but I was still worried. Some days I seem to do nothing but worry about him. It's annoying. "We don't have these Storms where I come from."

"Salar can show you," she said. "Salar!"

He took me to the edge of the village. It was sort of peaceful and pretty—the Storm didn't feel as bad down here. "Why does she push you around like that?" I asked him. "And why do you let her?"

"Why do you let the Doctor tell you what to do?" he countered.

"I don't! Yeah, sometimes I do what he wants, cos I like him. And I like traveling with him."

"That's why I do what Plecthros says," he told me. "Well, not so much because I like her. But she's not that bad. She's our Shaman, and I'm her apprentice. I get to learn all kinds of things, and go interesting places. And meet interesting people, like you. Here we are. Fethys, can we come in?"

There was a feeble response, and he lifted up a flap over one of the pits and we went in. It was a sort of underwater house, with tools in niches in the walls and a little hammock of woven kelp fiber. In the hammock was a very old woman, shrunken and wasted. Her hair was dull and thin, and her scales were falling off and leaving raw pink patches of wrinkly skin.

"Salar," she said. I saw that her eyes were milky and blind, like pearls. "What news?"

"I brought a visitor. Her name is Destriianatos, and she comes from very far away. She and her friend want to help us, but they've never seen Storm-sickness before."

Fethys held out a trembling hand. I didn't want to go to her, but I couldn't exactly run away, so I swam forward. Her fingers were like little cold sticks.

"Destriianatos," she said. "Welcome to our village. Can you help make me better?"

"I don't know," I said. Fethys was so old, I couldn't see how anyone could tell she'd got this Storm-sickness.

"Fethys is a little younger than me," said Salar.

I looked at Fethys. Her face was like a skull.

"I have to get some air," I said, and swam out of the pit as fast as I could.

**7. The Story So Far**

"Hey!" said Salar when he found me. "What's the matter with you? It's not contagious or anything. If that's what you're afraid of."

"I'm not afraid!" I said. I wasn't sure why I even cared what he thought of me. "I'm not afraid of anything! I'm just … not used to seeing sick people, okay?"

"What do you mean, not used to sick people? Don't people get sick where you come from?"

"Yeah, they got sick all the time. And then they'd get killed."

Salar gaped at me. "Why'd they do that? That's horrible!"

I shrugged. "If they were sick, it was because they were weak. Weak people didn't deserve to live. Or that's what I used to think. But you're right—it was a horrible place. Everything was horrible. That's why I ran away, and then I met the Doctor. Things are different with him."

Salar was keeping his distance from me now, like I was the one who was sick. "How's he different?"

"He's … he just is. He's always trying to be _nice_ to people, you know? Trying to help. He helped me, even though he didn't have much reason to. He saved my life after my uncle tried to kill me."

Salar's eyes, if possible, went even wider. He mouthed something like, _Your uncle?_

What, was everybody supposed to be nice or something on this world? Nobody had any homicidal relatives? He was acting like I'd been, I don't know, some sort of abused child or something.

Okay, so my mother used to take me down to the dungeons when I was a kid and torture me, but then I knifed her in the back. I decided not to tell Salar that bit. People get all funny about it when they hear I killed my mother.

I didn't have a great childhood. But I'm not a child any more, abused or otherwise. I can take care of myself. Uncle Jodafra just took me by surprise. Which was embarrassing enough …

"I trust the Doctor," I said. "I don't know why. I mean, everybody else I trusted, it turned out they were just using me. But you get to know the Doctor, and he's just … different."

I tried to tell him a little more about the Doctor, and the TARDIS. I wanted him to understand that the Doctor was special. It's not like I would trust just anybody.

Salar nodded. He looked like he hadn't understood one word in ten of what I'd said.

"I want to go see if the Doctor's any better," I said. "Can we do that now?"

"Yes, of course. I think the Storm's breaking, maybe he'll be awake."

**Next Chapter: The Wasteland—Coming Soon!**

Okay, I've got no reviews, and I've noticed no one is reading the next chapter. Could somebody please tell me what's wrong with this story so I can FIX the damned thing? Pleeeeeaaase?


	2. Chapter 2: The Wasteland

**Like A House Falling Into The Sea**

**Part II: The Wasteland**

**8. Back In Action**

The Doctor was awake when we got back. And he was perfectly normal (for him). That's the way he is. No matter what happens, he's always back to normal when he wakes up. Okay, if he has a really bad knock on the head, sometimes he'd groggy for like thirty seconds, but apart from that … it's disgusting, really.

"Time storm!" he said. "I told you I detected temporal turbulence. Now, you say this is a recent phenomenon?"

"There were a few Storms when I was a child," said Threkian. "Or at least I now believe them to be Storms. But Storms like today's, only since … perhaps when Salar was half-grown. They grow ever worse and more frequent."

"Can you stop them?" I asked.

"I have to find out what's causing them, first." He fidgeted against the straps that held him upright in the diving bell. "Do you mind if we surface? It's getting rather stuffy in here."

"As you wish. It should be safe now, if we avoid the Teroi."

"Can you help Fethys, Doctor?" I asked. We'd told him about the Storm-sickness.

"Perhaps, if I learn more about it." But he had that sort of shifty look in his eyes he got when he didn't want to admit he couldn't do something. "The first thing we must do is get back to the TARDIS. I need to run some scans. Now, you say the Teroi are poisoning the water. When did that start?"

"A year ago, perhaps," said Threkian. "Or that was when we first noticed. It started on the edge of our territory, and it is death to venture there now. The water is poison to breathe, and the Teroi kill anyone they catch. And there is the Beast of the Water."

"Beast?" I said. "Is that a metaphor, or is it something we can harpoon?"

"No," said Threkian. She looked away. "It is a terrible monster."

"And?" said the Doctor, when she didn't continue. "What about this monster?"

"It is a curse of the gods," said Plecthros. Completely unhelpful.

"What kind of curse?" asked the Doctor. "Threkian, tell me."

She exchanged a look with Plecthros. "A great fish," she said. "Like an eel, but with many limbs."

It was obvious that she was holding something back, but the Doctor let it pass, and kicked me in the ankle when I started to ask. I shut up. I can _too_ take a hint.

"We'll need a sample of contaminated water," he said. "If you could swim as close as is safe, there may be enough traces to analyze."

"Salar!" called Plecthros.

**9. For Whom The Bell Tolls**

The beach where we'd landed the TARDIS was over an hour's walk away from the Teroi guard outpost, and Threkian thought it was remote enough to be safe. When we got back, there was still nobody there, but we cut a few branches from the scrubby local plants and used them as camouflage. No sense in advertising.

Salar brought us a small jar of water (the Doctor supplied the jar) and came with us up onto the beach. He couldn't walk really well—he had a sort of stiff, shuffling waddle and looked twice as gangly as he did underwater. And he said he could only breathe for about half an hour. But that was long enough to have a good look inside the TARDIS.

He was impressed, but not as wowed as I thought he'd be. Apparently he thought it was just really good magic. Kind of disappointing, really.

The communications light was flashing (again) when we came in. The Doctor reached out a hand in passing and turned it off (again) without breaking stride, pretending nothing had happened. Then he turned to the rest of the instruments.

"Oh, dear, dear, dear," he said, tsking at the readouts. "Yes, there's a massive temporal distortion. It's affecting the entire planet, but there's a localized hotspot about twenty miles north of here. Destrii, let me see that water."

I handed the jar to him, and he put a few drops in the mass spectrometer. I could have run the mass spectrometer, but he had to do everything himself. It's no good talking to him when he's in his science mode. All you can do is hand him things and wait for him to get it out of his system.

"This jacket is toast," I said, pointlessly. "Soggy toast."

"Oh, very nasty. Very nasty indeed." He shook his head at the water sample results. I wasn't sure if he was impressed or appalled. Maybe both. "Gorindide, halathion, traces of broline … it looks almost like waste from … no, it couldn't be."

He does that in his science mode, too. Problem is, if you strangle him, you'll never get an answer.

"What?" I said.

"Unless …" He fiddled with a few controls. "Aha! Zordinite! They're mining for zordinite. See, here, there are traces of it in the runoff. The other chemicals are only byproducts of the refining process, highly toxic ones. They'd cause death at high levels of exposure, mutations at lower ones. That's probably where this Beast of the Water came from."

"So what's zordinite?" I asked. "And why are they mining it?"

"It's an explosive. Quite a powerful one, too." He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "The question is, what are they planning to do with it? Some sort of assault on the Istoi? No, that doesn't make sense. And here's an even better question—where did they get the technology to mine zordinite? That's far beyond those primitive guns they were carrying. And from what Threkian told me, the Teroi aren't that much more advanced than the Istoi."

"Aliens?"

"It seems likely."

"So, we go find this place up north, find Plan Nine from outer space, and we show it it ain't as tough as it thinks it is."

"More or less," said the Doctor. "Although I was hoping we could be a bit more subtle than that."

"Okay," I sighed. "So we whale on it till it begs for mercy, then we let it run away?"

"We only 'whale' if we have no other choice," said the Doctor sternly. "But otherwise, yes, that's the plan."

"Great. Come on, Doctor, cheer up. What could possibly go wrong?"

As if in answer, a terrible gonging noise came from the interior doors of the TARDIS. The Doctor flinched and turned towards it. "Oh, no."

"What?" Anything that scared him scared me. Much as it pains me to admit this, I think he's a bit braver than me. Just a smidge. But that's saying something. _Nothing_ scares him. "I'm just guessing here, but you're gonna tell me that's not the oven timer, aren't you?"

"The Cloister Bell," he said. "It only rings when we're in terrible danger."

I fidgeted, made myself stand still, trying to look cool. "Yeah, but we're in terrible danger all the time."

"More terrible than that," he snapped. He slapped a few switches on the console, which bleeped at him testily. "Never mind the niceties, just tell me what's happening!"

That last was addressed to the TARDIS. He does that too, talks to the ship like it's alive. Funny thing is, I've tried asking it nicely for things—and it works. Spooky.

"Well, what is it?" I asked.

"The time distortion may be more serious than I thought," he said, his voice dropping to a grave almost-whisper. "It's dangerous now, but it's unstable. You remember Threkian said the Storms had gotten worse recently?"

"Yeah."

"This may be a warning that they could get much worse. Soon."

"Yeah, but we can stop it, right? Cos we can stop anything. You and me, Doctor, come on."

I meant it to sound careless and confident, like I didn't have a worry in the world, but the deep tone of the bell somehow distorted my voice, made it sound uncertain.

He stood there for a moment, staring down at the readouts. Then he took a deep breath and bounced back into action, grinning like a child. "Of course we can! That bell's rung a dozen times before, and I'm still standing! Come on!"

**10. Plotting a Course**

"The Abode of Monsters," said Plecthros.

Yippee! More monsters! Break out the pitchforks!

"Fairy tales," muttered Threkian. But she kept her voice low enough that the shaman didn't catch it.

The Doctor had managed to sort out a rough system of measurements and direction with the Istoi, and the only remarkable landmark twenty miles to the north was … guess what?

"When my grandfather was a boy, a star fell from the sky, into the sea," said Plecthros. "It burned, and the sea could not quench it. So the sea rejected it, pushing up an island. And that island was an island of fire, and the Beasts of Fire dwelt therein."

Yadda, yadda, yadda, big whoop. So a space-ship crashed (full of some sort of fire-alien) and they've got a leaky reactor or something, and that's what's making the Storms. Gee, tell me something new.

"I see," said the Doctor. He rubbed his temples, as if he had a headache. "How do we get there?"

Hey, Ma, guess where we're going on vacation! Oh, and don't forget to pack the marshmallows. I think there may be a bonfire.

Plecthros and Threkian were both shaking their heads. "That's beyond Teroi territory, now," said the Leader. "And the water is full of monsters to the east, and poison to the west."

"What about the land?" asked the Doctor.

This provoked some discussion. The Istoi didn't come out of the water very much, they didn't know what was going on up there. Years ago, when they were still on speaking terms with the Teroi, that area was mostly uninhabited, but the mining evidence showed that there was at least some activity there.

"I expect they will be on guard. We have made several raids, since they began to poison the water," said Hirass.

"Yes, we noticed," said the Doctor, dryly. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "I think we might be better off sticking to the water. Or rather, _above_ the water. The pollution may be toxic to flesh, but it shouldn't do much harm to a boat. Hopefully, if we can get deep enough into Teroi territory, they won't be so suspicious."

"But if they are," I said, "this time I'm hitting them."

**11. Incognito**

"Are you going to be able to adjust that thing back?" I asked.

"Hm?" asked the Doctor, not looking up from my hologram generator.

"I said, if you tinker with that thing, can you put it back the way it was later?"

This time he did look up. The magnifying lens he had screwed over one eyes made him look even more demented than usual. "Certainly! Here, it's done. Try it on."

I looped the chain over my neck, switched it on, and looked into the mirror that hadn't been there an hour before. The disguise looked almost the same as before—the brown-skinned human woman. But now her skin was a shade lighter and grayer, coarser, and her hair was silver instead of red. Her hands were webbed.

She looked like a passable Teroi.

"Not bad," I said. "But you'd better be able to change it back. I like being able to walk around on pre-stardrive Earth."

"I'll find you a new one if I broke it," said the Doctor. "But I didn't."

"Okay. And what about you?"

"Ah. Just a tick." He strolled through the interior doors and reappeared an improbably short time later, dressed in primitive trousers and tunic, sporting silver hair, gray skin, and webbed fingers. "How do I look?"

"You missed a spot behind your ear."

He pulled a jar of pigment from his pocket and dabbed a bit on. "Better?"

"Much."

"Good. Here, put these clothes on. I'm told it's what the stylish Teroi peasant has been wearing the last few centuries."

**12. Departure**

The Istoi had never seen a boat before. Well, if you can't breath air, I guess there's not much point.

"That will really take you past the poisoned waters?" asked Salar, staring up at me from the water while I leaned over the side of the boat. "And by the way, this is a very strange way of having a conversation."

"Yeah, you can say that again," I agreed, looking down at him. "Look, we won't be breathing the water, we won't even be touching it. We'll be fine."

"I wish you well, Doctor, Destriianatos," said Threkian. "Go with the blessing of all the Istoi."

"Go well," said Hirass. He'd warmed up to us a little. Enough to admit that maybe, just maybe, we weren't demons. But only because Plecthros vouched for us.

"The omens are not auspicious," said Plecthros. Well, speak of the devil … "The time has not yet come for our salvation."

Salar bobbed his head up out of the water long enough to whisper, "The fish whose entrails she used, it had a funny liver."

"Oh, horrors," I said.

"Yes, livers are unreliable. Now, if the spleen foretold doom, that would be serious."

"I'll keep that in mind the next time I disembowel someone." On impulse, I leaned forward and gave him a quick kiss. He fell back into the water with a splash and came up sputtering.

"What was that?" he asked.

"It's called a kiss," I said. "It's for good luck. Or if I like someone."

"Well, which one is it?" He glanced away nervously, and I got the impression he would have blushed, if a fish could blush.

"Cos I like you," I decided. "I don't need luck to win a fight, never have."

"Well, better him than me," muttered the Doctor, and dipped his oar into the water. I had to follow suit to keep us from going in a circle, and we left Salar behind before he could gather his wits enough to make a response.

**13. Scylla and Charybdis**

We could smell the change in the water before we could see it. Even when was still a clear pale violet, it smelled like an accident in a chemical factory and stung my eyes and throat.

"It's horrible," I said.

"Yes, it's worse than I expected," said the Doctor grimly. He pulled out a breathing mask from our supplies and handed it to me. "Hopefully that should last long enough."

It did help. "What about you?"

"Oh, I'll be fine. I don't have an amphibious respiratory tract."

That was an unpleasant reminder. I needed water periodically, or my gills dehydrated and I couldn't breath at all. And the hot sun and the fumes weren't helping. But I could probably go a day or two. The idea was that we'd be over clear water by then.

I looked down into the water. There were occasional patches of sickly green, but most of it was bare sand, or, more often, pus-colored mats of dead kelp.

The Doctor rowed in silence, lips pressed together in a grim line. It wasn't worry about the Cloister Bell thingy—he just does this Silent Brooding Disapproval thing whenever we see an ecological disaster or a massacre or something like that. I don't know why.

I tried talking to him a few times, but he tended to respond with grunts or irritated looks, and eventually I gave up. Maybe he was seasick. He did look a little queasy. I didn't have much to say, anyway.

Even watching the muscles in his arms as he rowed lost its entertainment value pretty quickly. Pity. The short-sleeved tunic showed them off so well.

"Ugh," I said. The smell had suddenly gotten much worse. Now it smelled like dead fish. Probably because we were rowing through dead fish.

"Victims of the chemical runoff," said the Doctor. "Even the scavenger birds won't touch them. Or, if they do—"

He pointed elegantly with his oar in between strokes. I saw a dead bird, a bit like a gull, floating among the fish.

"And there's the source of the problems," he said.

I looked to our left. There was a mass of land over there on the horizon, rising up in rough hills that seemed to be this world's idea of mountains. Before, the hills had been covered in brush. But here, large areas were cleared, just reddish-ochre exposed dirt, and a lot of the hillsides had washed out to form crumbling cliffs. There were a few huts visible even at this distance, clustered most thickly around a brown stream that ran down to the ocean.

"Let's steer a little further from shore," said the Doctor, and we did that. I could see a few tiny figures of Teroi moving around the huts, and they'd have to have pretty poor eyesight not to be able to see us, if they looked in the right direction. In fact, from the was some of them were standing on the beach, I'd say they already had.

The land receded, and the smell of the water grew slowly more tolerable, which was a relief. I'd been starting to feel like my eyeballs were melting. "Hey, Doctor. Maybe we should check the water. Don't want to get eaten."

"Right. Let's see, then." He dipped the probe from a portable meter into the water. "Still quite toxic—and therefore safe. The concentrations closer to shore were far above lethal levels."

Something splashed off to our right, just to prove him wrong. His head whipped around, and he stared in wide-eyed amazement.

"Toxic?" I asked, putting extra sarcasm into my voice so he couldn't pretend not to have heard it.

"Ah," he said. "Perhaps some of these mutations are resistant to the pollution. Or the toxins simply need more time to kill them at lower concentrations. I wouldn't have expected them to venture so far into the dead zone, but perhaps they were drawn in by the sound of our oars."

"So we row west _really_ quietly, yeah?"

"Er, yes, more or less."

We started paddling west. Something in the east waved a couple of giant tentacles above the water, possibly in frustration. We paddled faster.

We got well back into the toxic zone (I could tell by how badly my eyes burned). The land was mostly empty again, and the sun was low behind dirty olive-drab clouds. Maybe fumes from something going on inland. We saw a few more streams dumping mustard-colored water into the sea before even that disappeared and the land became empty again.

By the time the sun started to set, the water was cleaner, and we strayed closer to the deserted shore. I expected the Doctor to cheer up, but he just watched the light, and he seemed more troubled than ever. But not grim—almost sad.

"Hey, are you gonna mope all evening, or are we gonna make camp?"

He turned around and gave me a quick smile, bright and cheerful as always. "Sorry. Miles away there. Goose walked over my grave."

"What? What's a goose?"

"Er—earth bird, eaten on holidays. It's an expression."

"Yeah? What's it mean?"

"A fleeting premonition of doom." He kept right on smiling, and I rolled my eyes. "Although I don't know why a _goose_. They're not very large, herbivorous, bit dimwitted. Not very menacing, although they've been known to chase joggers …"

He kept on chattering as we hauled the canoe up onto a tiny rocky islet covered in trees (and mostly held together by tree roots) and pitched a carefully disguised camp underneath their branches. There was no fire, and hence no toasting marshmallows (though I'd talked him into finding me some in the TARDIS) but the light cast by the setting sun made the whole world look like it was on fire.

"And then, of course, there's 'Your goose is cooked,' which means that you're in trouble, though actually the only one who would be in trouble in that situation would be the goose itself. If you _had_ a cooked goose, you'd have yourself a nice meal and you wouldn't have any trouble at all. Unless, of course, it was the goose that laid the golden eggs …"

It was all those hours bottling things up while he brooded. All the happy nonsense was spilling out at once. Still, it was a relief to have him back to his usual self.

Then I noticed the way the last light of the sun painted his face crimson, like fire. Or blood.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said, irritated that he'd noticed. "Just one of those goose things. Pass me that water, will you? I want to wet my gills."

**14. Patrol and Paper**

We had to stick to the shallows the next day, because the water was so much cleaner. But there were a lot of shallows now, dotted with atolls and sandbars. It was around here that we started to see more Teroi. By now it was pointless to try to hide. I turned on my hologram, and the Doctor touched up his makeup.

There weren't any other boats. I don't know if they were more afraid of the Beasts or the Istoi or if they just didn't like the water, but all the traffic we saw was on land, and on foot, mostly skinny-looking people with slumped shoulders and tattered clothes. Some of them were pulling heavy carts. None of them looked happy. They gave us a few nervous looks, and then pretended we didn't exist.

The land itself looked worse than it did around the mining areas. Withered, stunted, and burned bushes dotted sand and exposed rocks like bleached bones. Even the air had a dead smell.

"What's wrong with this place?" I asked the Doctor. It didn't seem like the home of the winning side.

"The time distortion," he said. He sounded a bit queasy, and he kept wincing, like his head hurt. "Can't you feel it? Taste it, in the back of your mouth?"

"Yeah, is that what that is? Ugh. It smells … well, it doesn't smell like anything much, just like all the life's been sucked out of this place."

"It has," he said grimly (he was back in his full-on Grim Mode again). "The constant exposure is destroying this place. It's not a healthy place to live. Look."

He nodded to the peasants shuffling along the road. I noticed one of them was hobbling, one hand holding a large basket of vegetables he had balanced on his shoulder, the other wielding a makeshift crutch. His left leg was withered and dragged uselessly on the ground. Another, a woman pulling a cart, had a sickly-looking baby in a sling. It had spindly limbs, an outsized head, and vacant eyes.

"Those are only the obvious mutations. And the ambulatory ones," said the Doctor.

We paddled for about two hours (and even my arms were starting to ache, after yesterday's marathon trip) before we got to the first guard outpost. I could see these guys had it a bit more together than the lot that tried to kill us. They came down to the water more quickly, and their clothes were in better repair. And cleaner. And they were in much better shape. In fact, the leader looked pretty fit.

"Halt!" he commanded, hefting his rifle but not pointing it yet. His pale hair was cropped short, and his skin was a grayish caramel, marked with a tattoo of a sea-serpent around one bicep. "Identify yourselves!"

"Travelers from Reskon!" the Doctor called back. Reskon was a Teroi village way to the south that the Istoi had told us about. "Name's Dectus. We're traders. Show them, Dessu."

The Doctor nudged us a little closer to shore, and I pulled a tarp away from our samples. The Doctor had set us up with some swank stuff (well, swank for Avarinne) from the TARDIS. "Beads, spices, dyes. Come on, boys, wouldn't your girlfriends love some of these beads?" I batted my holographic lashes at them.

"My girlfriend would be more grateful for them than my wife, I know that," said one of the guards, and his friends laughed.

The leader frowned. He was a bit on the young side, but he gave off an air of competence. Not exactly what we needed. "We haven't had visitors from Reskon in some time."

"All the more trade for us, then," I told him.

"Perhaps. You _do_ have papers, don't you?"

"Of course!" said the Doctor, smiling, even though we had no such thing. We hadn't even known that the Teroi had invented writing. "Mind the boat a moment, Dessu."

He swung his legs over the side and waded to the shore, pulling a small leather ID holder from his pocket. I almost groaned. I'd gotten him that for Christmas a few trips back, on this planet call Calumnis where everyone was telepathic. I'm still not entirely sure what Christmas is, but apparently it revolves around ritualized shopping. I ended up regretting it, because he uses it all the time now—and when it doesn't work (which it doesn't, always) it ends up getting us both into worse trouble than we were in to begin with.

He handed the guard leader the psychic paper and waited while the man squinted at it. Maybe he couldn't really read, and didn't want to admit it. We might be okay—as long as the paper didn't go blank.

Then the leader broke into a sudden grin and handed the paper back. "Well, that's all in order, then, Dectus!" he said. "You can go on your way. I'm afraid there isn't much market for luxuries right now, but I'd buy some beads for my girlfriend—if I had one."

"You want one?" I asked. His men laughed and elbowed him, and he grinned at me like he was planning on taking me up on the offer.

"Maybe, if you end up hanging around a while," he said. "But I'd advise both of you to be careful. Boat travel isn't safe in these parts. There are some very fierce animals in these waters. And there's a strict curfew in effect—if you're found out of doors after dark, we have orders to shoot on sight. And you'll be lucky if we find you before the Fire Beasts."

"The Fire Beasts?" asked the Doctor.

"Yes, they guard the streets after dark. They'll burn you alive." The guard frowned. "I've seen the results. It's an ugly way to die. You'll need a place to stay, of course—my friend Ullan will probably put you up. Just tell him Captain Rei sent you."

"Thank you very much," said the Doctor, although we intended to go straight to the Abode of Monsters and sort things out.

"And don't lose your papers," called Captain Rei as the Doctor waded back to the canoe. "His Lordship's very particular about that sort of thing."

"We'll do that," I said. Then, to the Doctor, "His Lordship?"

"I expect we'll be meeting him," said the Doctor. "I have a number of questions I'd like answers to."

From the look on his face, His Lordship was not going to enjoy that little quiz session.

**15. The Monsters**

"So you think His Lordship is someone from space or something?"

"That would be my guess," said the Doctor, as we trudged through the crowded streets. We'd been forced to abandon the boat, as there were no navigable waterways that led past the village. "The guards' weapons—never mind the mining technology—can't be a product of this civilization."

"Yeah. So, are we gonna sort him out first, or the time distortions?"

"Both. But the time distortions are the more serious problem. If that gets much worse, we'll have bits of next week falling into last year. We—good grief!"

The Doctor came to an abrupt halt and stared. I stared, too. A group of grimy children were chasing what appeared to be a badly-damaged Cyberman through the streets, pelting it with rocks. It staggered and lurched, making electronic sounds of protest and flailing at the air.

"Careful with that thing!" I said, grabbing one of the children.

"Aw, piss off." The little tyke tried to kick me in the knee. "You it's mother, or what?"

"Better than being yours," I said. "I mean, it's dangerous."

"Yeah, right." The kid twisted away and scampered off with his friends.

"Very decent of you," said the Doctor. I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or approving. He was rubbing at his temples again, and I think the headache was making him cranky. Well, crankier than insane dictators usually make him.

"I'm never having kids," I told him. "That came through some sort of time-rift, yeah?"

"Undoubtedly. The damage is even worse than I thought."

We kept walking, and soon reached the outskirts of town. There was no one in sight, and I turned off my hologram to conserve the battery. It was funny—all of the buildings sprawled to the south, some of them crammed pretty tight, but there was all this empty land out here. It rose up in a gentle slope, and as we came to the top we could see a coastline spread out beneath us, with a great dome-topped house (virtually a palace for the Teroi) surrounded by a few outbuildings. The only path down to the water led past it. Nothing grew here—just rocks and sand and the black branches of long-dead shrubs. There were no other dwellings visible.

When we got our first clear look at the Abode, off in the distance, we could see why. It was a mass of twisted … metal? Like an office building that had fallen out of the sky and been nearly turned into a pancake. But the details were difficult to make out, because the entire thing was wreathed in flames. The water sizzled and churned around it.

There was something wrong about the flames. They weren't quite the right color, and they moved too slowly, now and then flickering almost at normal speed, like time was a watch with a dying battery. They made no smoke, and they didn't consume the Abode—occasionally a bit melted or collapsed, if you stared long enough, but other bits were uncollapsing at the same time.

A hundred years. It had been doing this for a hundred years. No wonder nobody wanted to live over here.

"Hey! Hey, you two! What d'you think you're doing?"

I whirled around at the shout. We'd stood woolgathering for too long. A pair of guards had come from one of the dome-house's sheds, and were coming towards us. They carried guns, which they had half-pointed in our direction. Apparently, they thought we weren't that dangerous.

The Doctor didn't move. He was staring at the Abode, frozen. Hell, that wasn't good. It must be even worse than we'd thought.

"Oh, gosh, I'm sorry!" I said as the guards approached. We had to deal with them before we could do anything. "We didn't mean no harm, honest, we just got a bit turned around and—"

It was a really lousy act (see, I can admit when I'm not good at stuff) but the bozos fell for it. I could see them shifting their weapons, deciding we weren't much threat and getting ready to smack us around a bit and put us under arrest. I punched out the nearer one while he was still raising his own arm to backhand me, grabbed his rifle, and turned on his buddy.

I almost pointed and fired. But I guess the Doctor's been a bad influence on me. I reversed the weapon and hit him in the face with the stock, instead. It made a very satisfying crunch. Ah, I love the sound of breaking cartilage in the morning.

"Come on, Doc," I said. "Let's move!"

He stayed put, frozen in place. I grabbed his arm and tugged.

"Yes," he said, seeming to come back to himself a bit. His eyes were very wide, and his face had gone pale under the makeup. But at least he was moving again. "Let's go. There's not a moment to waste."

"Oh, you're not going anywhere."

The voice had come from the dome-house, smooth and cultured and self-assured. The Doctor and I turned to see shapes made of flame ghosting out through the walls, flanking the door. They were translucent, flickering, vaguely and monstrously humanoid when they had any shape at all.

"What?" breathed the Doctor. "No, oh no, no no no no no …" He stared at them with a stricken look on his face.

And from the door of the house stepped a tall, slender figure, elegant in his antique green coat and carrying a walking stick with a silver head in the shape of a cat's. I knew that walking stick. It had almost taken my life, once.

His own head was that of a cat's, if cats could smile, slick and self-satisfied.

"No," I said. It was my turn to freeze now. I thought I'd been prepared for anything, but I wasn't prepared to see him again.

"Why, hello there, Destriianatos," he purred. "Don't you have any greetings for your Uncle Jodafra?"

**Coming Soon—Part Three: Defeat**


	3. Chapter 3: Defeat

**III: Defeat**

**16. The Bit Where the Villain Explains His Evil Plot**

The Doctor wasn't saying anything. He was too busy staring at the flame-creatures. They must be the Beasts that Captain Rei told us about. So I figured I'd have a go.

"You tried to kill me," I said to my uncle. Not very original, I admit, and it came out sounding less accusatory than shaken. He looked exactly as he had the last time I'd seen him, down to his boots. The only change was a strange pendant he wore on a chain around his neck, a twist of golden metal that looked like it had come out of a wreck.

"Did I?" mused Jodafra, stroking his chin in thought, as if he couldn't quite remember. A trifling detail, soon forgotten. "Ah, well, perhaps I did. You must admit, you did provoke me."

For a mad moment, I wanted to apologize, ask him to forgive me, because for most of my life Uncle Jodafra had been the only one I could trust, the only one who cared.

I glanced at the Doctor again, trying to find some solid ground to stand on. But he didn't appear to have heard any of our conversation. He was looking at the Beasts like he'd seen a ghost. Like he'd seen a ghost of somebody he hadn't known was dead. He wasn't going to help me this time.

But he'd already helped me, hadn't he? He'd shown me I had other people I could trust besides my uncle, people I could trust _more_ than my uncle.

"I did what I had to do," I told Jodafra. And I had, and I was far less sorry now than I had been. Dear Uncle had been about to perform a human sacrifice starring a bunch of kiddies.

I hefted the gun, pointing it squarely at his heart. Or what passed for his heart.

"Please," he said, amused. "My dear, think what you are doing. I and I alone control these creatures. Kill me, and you will die a most unpleasant death. Not to mention your friend here."

"Bit of a Mexican stand-off, then," I said, trying not to look at the Beasts. The way their shapes twisted and melted was distracting, not to mention disturbing. If you stared at them too long, you almost started to imagine you saw flashes of humanoid features. "Cos the minute you, your guards, or your creatures comes for us, I make sure I take you with me."

"Indeed. A most vexing quandary." He gestured to the guards, who were beginning to stir, and they edged away from us, giving me a few dirty backwards looks as they retreated to their guardhouse.

"What are you doing here, Jodafra?" asked the Doctor, speaking for the first time. His voice was flat and hoarse.

"Curious as ever, eh, Doctor?"

"I know you're trapped," the Doctor said. "The time distortions would keep the _Salvation_ from taking off. If they haven't destroyed it. And I know you've been mining zordinite."

Jodafra merely raised a brow-ridge. "My, you've been busy." He'd learned well to control his reactions, as part of my mother's court. A twitch of guilt could get you atomized there. "And what is it that you suspect I'm up to?"

"Well, all the appearances are," said the Doctor, a hint of a bite creeping into his voice, "that you're planning on using the zordinite to demolish the … structure that seems to be the source of the time distortions. Although I must admit that I wouldn't expect you to attempt anything _that_ spectacularly stupid. It's sure to rip most of this solar system right out of the continuum, and you along with it."

Most of the solar system? And surely all of Avarinne. All the purple seas and green skies and Teroi and Istoi, gone in an instant. Because of one man.

"Ah, but you see, I've adjusted the shields of the _Salvation_ to allow me to ride out the blast. It will merely fling me into the Vortex—provided I launch at precisely the correct moment. And my timing has always been impeccable."

The Doctor opened his mouth to reply, fire flashing in his eyes. Now he was gonna give Jodafra a piece of his mind, pull something impossible out of his sleeve and save the planet.

But then his eyes slid back to the Beasts, and a tremor went through his body, and his shoulders sagged. He closed his mouth again without speaking.

"You can't," I told Jodafra. "You can't destroy a whole planet just to jump-start your car! We won't—"

"Well, look at you," he chuckled. "Doctor, you've turned my darling niece into an honest-to-goodness self-righteous heroine! I must admit, I wouldn't have thought she'd had it in her." He frowned slightly at me. "And I must admit I'm disappointed in you, Destrii. This is foolishness. The only way to stop me is to kill me, and we've already established that you can't do that without being killed yourself."

He practically oozed confidence, so sure he knew what I would do. I wouldn't sacrifice my life for strangers. Not even a whole planet of them.

Yeah, and I used to think that, too.

I grinned at him, baring my teeth. "So?" I asked, hefting the gun. "Run for it, Doc!"

"No!" he shouted, suddenly lunging and knocking my arm up, spoiling my aim. It was the most life he'd shown since we'd seen the Beasts and the Abode. He grabbed my wrist and held it, keeping the gun from pointing at my uncle. His hand felt oddly clammy. "No, Destrii. It's no good, don't you see? Even if we stop Jodafra now, the time distortions will destroy this planet in a decade."

I twisted my arm away, half relieved and half angry that I wasn't going to die after all, and wondering what I'd been thinking. But I'd seen Jodafra flinch, just a little. Didn't know me so well, after all, did he?

"What, so we should let him blow it up now and get it over with?" I snapped. I was pissed at the Doctor for getting rattled. He was supposed to be the one who went around saving people. Not me. I was the happy-go-lucky tourist. How'd I end up doing his job?

"No," he said, "but if we die now, we won't be able to stop much of anything, hm?"

I lowered the gun. He was right, but—

"We're just gonna leave him?" I demanded.

The Doctor just nodded. "No choice. Come on. There's nothing we can do here now."

I kept the gun out and half-raised as we backed away. Jodafra laughed. "Running away, Doctor?" he called. "A wise decision. How very unlike you! If your TARDIS were working, I'd almost believe you were about to flee this world. But if your TARDIS were working, no doubt you'd offer me transport to stop me causing any more destruction here. I'm afraid I can't say I would be so generous in your place. But, you, Destriianatos, are another story."

I made the mistake of making eye contact. It only encouraged him to go on.

"You're my own flesh and blood, Destrii," he purred, giving me a fond smile. "We could put aside our differences—every family has its squabbles, after all—and I could take you away from all this. We'll travel together again and see the universe …"

I'd been braced for taunts and threats. This was, oddly, harder to listen to. I suppose I've heard more threats than endearments in my life.

"Come on," I growled at the Doctor, pulling him further up the road and out of easy range of weapons-fire. I turned my back on my uncle and broke into a jog, the Doctor coming with me perforce.

**17. Retreat**

We ran back through the town, making it almost back to the boat before word reached the guards that we were on Avarinne's Most Wanted list. Would have made it, if the Doctor hadn't been dragging his feet. I don't know if it was the time distortion making him sick, or what, but he seemed almost not to care if he got caught.

Well, _I_ cared if _I_ got caught. Starting to lose interest in his safety, though.

When we got to the docks, I didn't see any guards at first. Then I heard shouts off to the left. "There they are! Get them!"

Gee, they couldn't come up with something more original? Been hearing that all my life.

"Come on," I growled at the Doctor, yanking his arm and almost pulling him off his feet. The guards had been over by a cluster of ramshackle buildings, trying to catch our old tin buddy the Cyberman. I never thought I'd be grateful for a Cyberman. But if they'd been waiting by the boats, we would have been screwed.

"Get down!" I shoved the Doctor into the boat as the guards opened fire. They didn't seem to be very good shots. I returned fire, and they dove for cover. From behind which they resumed firing. Water sizzled and a wooden crate blew apart in a cloud of flame and splinters. "Shit! We're never gonna get out of here in this little matchbox."

"Use the motor," suggested the Doctor, from where he'd fallen half-under the seat. His voice was aggravatingly casual.

"Motor? It has a motor?"

"For emergencies. It's hidden under that box."

"And you decided we should row for two days because …?"

"Well, we wouldn't want to call attention to ourselves, would we?"

Have you ever been in a boat with someone and really, _really_ wanted to chuck them overboard? No? Well, let me tell you, it can be a lot harder to resist than you would think. And nobody ever thanks you, afterwards.

I fired off a few more shots just to keep them cautious and pushed the boxes aside. I'd been expected something cobbled together from spare parts, most of them five hundred years old and built in the 1950's, so I was pleasantly surprised to find something sleek and gleaming silver. I swung it over the stern and hit the most likely candidate for an "ignition" switch.

It made a sort of muffled screaming noise, and shot us out of the docks like a bullet out of a gun. I almost fell overboard. When I regained my balance, I was ready to kill the Doctor—until I saw that the boxes had fallen on top of him (which was some consolation), and ended digging him out instead.

"Keep your head down," I told him. There were still a few laser shots sizzling by overhead, but they were becoming more and more sporadic with distance.

"We have to get under cover," he said. His face was chalky white where his make up had rubbed away and slick with sweat, and he looked like he was about to be sick. I wasn't feeling too hot myself. The seas of Avarinne were smooth, but at these speeds the slightest waves made the boat buck violently.

"No shit, Sherlock." A stray shot winged the motor with a metallic _skreeeee!_

"No, there's … another buildup … temporal distortion … Who's steering, by the way?"

"That'd be Blind Luck, sweetie."

"Oh, dear …"

The Doctor's eyes rolled up, and he slid back down under the seat.

I could feel it, too, even over the shaking of the boat and the rush of adrenaline. It was worse than last time, a pressure in my head and a metallic taste in the back of my throat that nearly made me gag. Time Storm.

I couldn't hear any more shots over the wind and waves, so I chanced poking my head up. The docks were distant, the guards running for cover. They could feel it, too.

Cover. How to get under cover with an unconscious Time Idiot, when you're out in the middle of an ocean that's either toxic or filled with creatures …

Okay. So there were people living near the Abode of Monsters, and they obviously survived. After a fashion. Maybe they all had lead-lined cellars. The effects were less severe deep underwater, so mass was a shield.

I wrestled with the tiller, almost capsizing us until I got the hang of maneuvering at these speeds, and turned us behind a rocky island.

I had time to cut the motor, beach the boat on a sandbar, and wonder if the water here was clean enough for monsters before the Storm hit and I passed out.

**18. The Beast of the Water**

I woke up with a vicious headache and an inability to feel my tongue or extremities. The sun hadn't moved far in the sky, and I didn't feel bad enough to have been passed out for a whole day, so I couldn't have been out very long at all.

I checked on the Doctor. He was still out—funny, you'd think a Time Lord would be more resistant to a Time Storm instead of less. Time Wimp. His skin was clammy but he was breathing regularly. I wet a cloth with a bit of our bottled water and wiped his face with it, but it didn't rouse him. What are you supposed to do with unconscious people, anyway? I'd spent most of my life trying to knock people out, not wake them up.

I drank a fair bit of our water myself and wet my gills as best I could. Our supplies were starting to run low, but we needed to get away, and with the Doc out of action I needed to keep myself fighting fit.

He slept through the motor starting up. And through the miners on the shore taking pot-shots at us (one of which holed our boat just above the waterline and just to the left of his head). And through my admittedly rough-and-ready evasive maneuvers. The Beast of the Water, however, woke him up after eating only part of the boat.

"GAAAH!" he said, when he opened his eyes and found himself being pulled out from under the seat by a slimy green tentacle wrapped around his ankle.

(Why is it always green? I mean, seriously. There are other colors out there.)

I managed to fend off the head end (which was about five feet across, asymmetrical, and had tentacles of its own, an indeterminate number of eyes and mismatched mouthparts, many with teeth) long enough to put a few laser-bolts in the appendages going for the Doctor. It let go of him, and he gave it a few kicks of his Venusian kung-fu or whatever it is before diving back under the seat just in time to dodge an arm the size of a small tree and equipped with claws like swords.

Oops. There went another piece of the boat.

"Destrii! Get us out of here!" he shouted, yelping and jumping back out from under what was left of the seat. He punched the creature in the face, right between the third tusk and the fifth nostril. It made a _squee_--ing noise and flinched back.

That exposed its underbelly. I put a few shots into it there, where it seemed more vulnerable, and followed it up with another to the face when it hunched down to protect itself. It gurgled and retreated a short distance.

Behind me, the Doctor lunged for the motor and frantically tried to get it in gear. He managed somehow, despite the teeth-marks in the casing, and we sped off with the monster in pursuit.

"No, this way!" I struggled with the tiller, aiming us for the more polluted water. "Damn! Here, hold this!"

He nodded, pale and tight-lipped, and took over steering while I shot a few more rounds at the creature. Damn, that thing was fast.

"We're taking on water!" shouted the Doctor over the wind.

"That's the least of my worries right now." There was a disturbed vee of water following us—the creature moving under the surface. But then it veered away, slowing and turning back for clean water. "It's gone."

"One problem solved, a dozen or so to go," said the Doctor. "Why is it that whenever I pass out, everything is so much worse when I wake up?"

He gets grumpy when he's embarrassed.

I shifted around, setting aside my rifle and helping him with the tiller. The boat was bucking worse than ever, the rents in the hull creating drag. The water was rising under the seats. I wondered if we could swim to shore, if it came to that.

"Don't get it on your skin, Destrii," said the Doctor. "At these concentrations, the toxins could be fatal even without ingestion."

Okay. No swimming, then.

"Right. Let's make for that beach." There was a broad stretch of sand that looked like it might make for a good landing spot. "What the hell was that thing, anyway? Was it a mutant, or did it come through the time rifts from somewhere?"

I didn't much care (unless the answer meant there would be more of the things) but I wanted to keep the Doctor talking. He didn't seem to be recovering as quickly this time.

"Both, I should think." The Doctor shifted, drawing his feet up away from the contaminated water. "It's highly unlikely that a mutation that severe would be able to survive, let alone compete for prey in the wild. And it appeared to have anatomical features from several species."

"What, like half-squid, half-snake, half Creature From the Black Lagoon?"

"No." He frowned at me. "And that's three halves. I doubt different animals would be genetically compatible enough. I think it's a hybrid of different versions of the _same_ species—different paths that evolution might have taken, pulled together from their divergent time-lines."

"I'd hate to meet whatever species that was, then."

He was silent for an uncharacteristically long moment, and I looked away from the struggling motor long enough to catch the look he was giving me—troubled, sad, but somehow turned inwards. Like he was thinking about his own problems.

"I think we already have," he said.

"I think I'd remember if—" Understanding dawned. "No. No way."

"It was strange," he went on, voice rising slightly, "how reluctant the Istoi seemed to talk about the Beast of the Water. Wasn't it? But then, who can blame them? It's a terrible thing. To see what you're capable of becoming. To see the face of the enemy … and see your own eyes staring back at you."

"This is why I like hitting things better than introspection."

**19. Wrecked**

The bottom of the boat scraped sand and shells, hard. The motor sputtered and cut out. "Rusted," observed the Doctor. "From the time distortion, no doubt. Although I'm sure the bites missing out of it didn't help."

"No kidding." I tried not to look too closely at the motor as I pulled the Doctor to his feet and helped him jump over the shallow water to dry land. It reminded me of Fethys. Better the motor than me.

There weren't any Teroi in sight, but I hustled the Doctor to the tree-line (if you could call it a "tree" line—not one of them was over ten feet) just in case. It gave us good cover, but the underbrush was sparse enough not to slow us down.

The Doctor was taking care of that himself.

"Come on, Doc," I said, pulling his arm over my shoulder and half-dragging him. "I want to get well away from the boat before someone spots it and comes looking."

But the climb up from the beach seemed to have sapped what little energy he had left. He was pale and trembling, and I found myself taking most of his weight. Then he started to shake harder, gasping. I let him go just in time for him to take a few staggering steps away and be sick into some bushes.

"Come on," I said, when he seemed to be finished. "Just over here."

I got him into a tumble of coral boulders with a mossy semi-cave in its center, and eased him onto the ground, brushing a few locks of his absurd hair out of his eyes. He offered no resistance or protests, only semi-conscious.

This couldn't work. Oh, I was strong enough to have carried him a fair ways, but not back to the TARDIS. And the trip wouldn't do him much good. Frankly, he looked like he might croak on me anyway—probably would, if another Time Storm caught us out in the open.

I should leave him. Staying here wasn't likely to accomplish anything but get me killed. Even if he recovered enough to walk, the Storms were too close together—there was a good chance we wouldn't make it in time. And it wasn't like I needed him to get into the TARDIS. I had my key, and I figured I knew enough to fly it. Assuming it could be flown anywhere, which at the moment it couldn't.

Oh, hell. I might as well stay.

**20. Confessions from the Future**

He didn't wake up until nightfall, but he looked a damned sight better when he did. A bit surprised, but a lot healthier.

"Marshmallow?" I asked, rather stickily. I offered him the stick. The marshmallow on the end was a bit burnt, but only slightly on fire.

He looked from the campfire to me to the night sky above. He took the marshmallow, shook it slightly to extinguish it, and ate it slowly.

"There's water, too," I told him. "I found a stream. And I saved you some fish." I'd been about to eat his share of the fish if he hadn't woken up. But he didn't need to know that.

"Thank you." He went for the water first, hesitating before putting the bottle to his lips.

"It's safe," I said. "I saved the meter. No toxins." I'd made damned sure I'd tested it before I went swimming in it, even though my gills had been killing me. "That's where I caught the fish, too."

"Very resourceful."

Not really. I just set the rifle to stun and blasted the water until unconscious fish started floating to the surface. But that seemed like the kind of thing that might upset the Doctor, so I didn't say anything.

He nursed his water for a bit, and picked at his fish. We ended up splitting what was left. He was very quiet, as if there were things he needed to say and didn't want to.

"Bit of a risk, isn't it?" he asked. "The fire, I mean."

He sounded like he was talking around something. "Yeah," I said, shrugging. "But I wanted to cook the fish, and you were freezing cold. Anyway, I didn't see any signs of people, and the rocks should hide the worst of the light."

He nodded. "It's my fault, you know."

His tone was so casual it took me a moment to realize what he'd said. I mentally reviewed our scant conversation so far. Nope. "Huh?"

"The Time Storms. And, as I suppose your uncle is only trapped here because of the Storms, all of his actions are my fault as well." He picked up a branch and prodded the fire, studiously avoiding my eyes.

"How's it your fault?" I demanded. Because now and then he does go on these outrageous guilt trips.

He sighed, pulling up his knees and gazing into the fire. "I've told you I'm a Time Lord. I've told you I have two hearts and thirteen lives. But that's just me. I haven't told you about my people. About Gallifrey."

"You gonna?" I prompted, when he paused.

"Not all of it. It's a long, long story, and it keeps changing. Bit of an embarrassment, that—they're so keen on keeping time tidy, and they can't get their own history to go in a straight line. The bits anyone still remembers, anyway. Sometimes I wonder if our historians have forgotten deliberately, just to hide how much of a mess it really is …"

**21. Lost World**

_They were old when all worlds were young. They were the first great Power in the universe (or they were, and always had been, after the First Great Time War) and they were like Gods. When Earth's star was a swirl of dust out of a nebula, they ruled all things._

_They are ancient and eternal. Their world holds power undreamed of by the lesser species, even now, in their twilit years, when they are but a fraction of what they were. But the power they once had is too great even for them to wield. Theirs is a world of lost things, of buried artifacts and whispered secrets and things long forgotten and come to dust. _

_Or wished to dust._

_They call them the Dark Times. Unlike the races of later eons, the Dark Times of Gallifrey were the times of greatest achievement—greatest and most terrible. They left those days behind lest they rend all time apart with their merest whims._

_So they withdrew, they became a race that forgot, that watched, that never set foot on the roads of time lest they step on the wrong butterfly and crush destiny under the tread of gods. They lived like shadows, like ghosts, like the dead._

_They came to live under the shadows of prophecies, under the knowledge of their own doom. That was the price of knowing all things—knowing how all things end._

_And they fell so far from what they were—or what they wanted to believe they'd once been—that they fought that destiny, even as the lesser races did. And by fighting, brought it to pass._

_It was an outcast who restored them. One of their own, a meddler and a thief and an exile, a coward and a liar and a scoundrel, who gave all he had. Gave his mind and his future and his past, and defied all of History itself._

_And by daring, won._

_He broke Time and Fate by his daring, and Gallifrey was reborn from the destruction of its destiny. And the Universe was remade, and a new future made—one with no certain doom, no certain anything. And the oldest power of the universe was reborn like a child, with all possibilities restored to it, free for the first time since the days of Rassilon._

_They took that future, held it in their hands, breathed deep of their freedom._

_And then they threw it away._

**22. Destiny**

"And then they threw it away," said the Doctor.

"It was you, wasn't it?" I said. "You saved them. You changed things."

"I thought I did." The firelight filled the long hollows of his face with shadow, making him look like a statue of despair. "I don't know. I don't think I have, really. I wanted to believe I'd succeeded, but—"

"You can't save people," I said. "Not from themselves, anyway."

"I can do anything," he snapped, turning to glare at me. "Or I could have, if I hadn't gotten it wrong. I made a mistake, somewhere. I thought I could save them and run away and never look back. But the Time War—the _last_ Time War—has started anyway. Now it's too late. And I've brought it here."

"You brought it here?"

He lowered his gaze. "Yes. That's why the Storms are affecting me so badly—they're the result of a temporal paradox that I'm part of. I ignored the messages from Gallifrey, asking me to return home. I came here instead. But I will go back. My part in the War is a fixed point in time. It can't be changed. When I tried to run anyway—"

"What, so destiny is punishing this planet because you wouldn't play along?" It was too much like the Wrath of God for me. I don't believe in any deity—at least, not a benevolent one. I've seen too much crap in my life. "I thought you were more of a free will kind of guy."

He sat staring into the fire for a long time. "You should get some sleep," he said at last. "We have a long walk ahead of us."

**23. The Empty Place**

I slept; I don't think he did. He was still sitting there staring at the ashes when I woke up at dawn and we started out. He seemed better, if a bit withdrawn, and I really hoped he would pull himself together so we could make some sort of plan to sort out my uncle.

It took us two days to get back to the Istoi village, traveling mostly over land. We had to make some detours to avoid Teroi, and the land itself curved around, taking us out of our way.

We were lucky enough not to encounter any more Storms along the way. But as one of my combat instructors used to say, "Luck is an evil bitch." Maybe it would have been better off to die then and get it over with, instead of prolonging the agony.

And when we got back, we found that Fethys had died shortly after we left, Hirass and half his warriors had been killed in an unauthorized (and failed) raid on the Teroi, and half a dozen more killed fighting the Beast when it had strayed too close to the village. And Threkian had caught the Storm-sickness herself.

"I'm sorry," said the Doctor. He was using a compact rebreather from the TARDIS that fitted over his nose and mouth, muffling his words. But his eyes spoke clearly enough. "I'm so sorry, Threkian. I tried …"

She smiled at him gently, amid the torn kelp. She was well enough, only a new dullness of her scales and a rash of lines on her face to show she was dying. From what Salar told me, she could go on for weeks. Maybe a few months.

"It's not your fault," she said. "Our best and bravest have accomplished less with greater numbers."

He didn't argue, but he refused any comfort. He didn't tell her his theory that the Storms were a result of his actions, but I'm sure if he had she would have told him the same thing I did—it was a load of bollocks.

"Can you help her?" I asked him, when we were out of earshot. "Look, I know you couldn't do anything for Fethys, but Threkian's not as far gone."

He smiled for the first time in days. It was half-sad, and half-hopeful. "I …" He paused, then said, "I can certainly try!" As if he'd been on the verge of saying something else. "I have supplies in the TARDIS. It's a long shot, but it may work. I'll need you to get some samples from Plecthros. She'll probably have samples of any local medicinal substances, things specific to Istoi biology."

"Yeah, sure." Not that the prospect of dealing with Plecthros filled me with joy. Oh, well, perhaps Salar could help me out.

"Destrii …"

I looked back. The Doctor was still smiling. "You've changed," he said.

"What, me? Nah." Gah. This sort of touch-feely crap always made me nervous.

"You have, though," he said. "You stayed with me, when I was sick. You risked your life for me. You could have just run."

"Yeah, and I would have, if I'd really been in any danger."

He took my hand, squeezed it gently until I met his eyes and gave him my full attention.

"Thank you," he said.

Of all our adventures together, that's how I remember him best—smiling at me behind his rebreather, with the purple and green lights of the Avarinne ocean lighting his face and his chestnut curls floating around his head. And the gentle light in his wide blue eyes, even in the midst of so much loss.

If I hadn't known the TARDIS couldn't take off because of the time distortions, I would have suspected he was going to do something stupid. That _thank you_ sounded too much like someone trying to say goodbye. But I knew he was grounded, so I went off to Plecthros' hut.

When I got tired of waiting for him and went up on the beach, there was an empty depression on the sand where the TARDIS had been.

**Coming Soon—The Abode of Monsters**


	4. Chapter 4: The Abode of Monsters

Nearing the end—will someone please tell me what's wrong with this story? Why is no one reading it?

**IV: The Abode of Monsters**

**24. What Would Spock Do?**

The morning sun woke me, coming through the flaps of my tent. I'd left them open for that purpose. Wouldn't do to start getting lazy—although I didn't know why I should bother, really.

I went through my usual morning routine. Straighten my bedroll, go out for a quick swim, have a bit of dried fish for breakfast. I was wearing a ragged little bikini made from the remnants of my Teroi disguise, which I fancied had a sort of marooned-chic-stylishness about it. No hologram. I was with the Istoi now, who looked more fish-like than I did.

Besides, it reminded me too much of _him._

Of course, the tent and bedroll were from him, along with some spare clothes and other supplies. But they didn't carry the same memories, and sometimes I just wanted to be alone. When you're living with a bunch of fish-people, dry land is the place you go to be alone.

I still wore my TARDIS key on a chain around my neck, though. I don't know why. Walking contradiction, that's me. But it was oddly comforting, warm against my skin, a little taste of home.

He'd left me a new leather jacket. Well, maybe not _new_ new, but new to me. It didn't quite fit, and the weather was a bit too balmy on Avarinne. I hung it up in my tent, with his last letter in the pocket.

_Dear Destrii,_ it read. _I'm sorry. I wish I could take you with me, but the only way I can leave this world is by locking on to the signal of the Time Lords, and that will take me home, to the War. And once I'm there, I'm very much afraid I won't be able to come back for you until it's over._

_It's not your fight. You can't help me, and I doubt you would survive long enough to try. I do not expect to survive it myself. But resolving the time paradox is my only chance to save Avarinne, and you, and I can only do that by going to meet my future._

_If I should fail to return_

This last line was scribbled out. Beneath it was written,

_Do not attempt to stop your uncle by yourself. If you are left with no choice, you must lure him away from the Abode of Monsters. Do not attempt to enter it yourself. And under no circumstances approach the fire-creatures. They are deadly, and you cannot fight them._

Destrii, you have traveled with me for far too short a time. But in that time, I've watched you grow into someone I'm proud to call my friend. You've been my ally, my protector, and one of my most courageous companions. If we never meet again, I want you to know that.

It was signed, "The Doctor," and under that a strange swirling squiggle of text I assumed was his Time Lord name.

I wished he hadn't left me the note. I wished he'd just taken off, without trying to make out it was some sort of selfless sacrifice, something he did for my own good. I don't need anyone to sacrifice themselves for me.

Some days I thought about taking my uncle up on his offer. Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? And he was the only way off this planet. If anything was stopping me, it was pride. I wasn't ready to ask for a lift from somebody who'd beaten me senseless and left me for dead.

Not quite ready.

Salar found me sunning myself on a rock. He flopped up next to me, being careful not to put any weight on his right arm. He'd been hurt two weeks before, in a knife-fight with a Teroi scout. We'd lost too many fighters. Now everyone strong enough to hold a blade fought when the village was threatened.

"Threkian's asking for you again," he said.

"I saw her yesterday. What does she want now?"

He shrugged. "Didn't say." He hesitated a moment, and added, "She doesn't have long left."

Threkian had survived longer than any of us expected. It had been a month since the Doctor had left, and the strong leader had shrunken into a frail old woman. Only her eyes stayed the same, hard as steel. She was still holding the Long Kelp clan together with her iron will, but she couldn't last much longer.

"We should go," said Salar, at length. "We shouldn't keep her waiting."

"Yeah." I didn't move. It hurt to watch Threkian decline, and I avoided these visits whenever I could.

"Destrii …" Salar propped himself up on his good elbow. "He isn't coming back, you know."

I looked away. "Yeah."

"What are you going to do?"

"Do?" I found that I was suddenly getting angry. "What do you mean, what am I going to do?"

"Well … you know … stop your uncle, fight the Teroi, save us from the Storms. Like the Doctor would have. Like you used to help him do."

"Listen," I told him, "I used to think that was what the Doctor would do. But it's not. He ditched me, and he ran away and saved himself. It was all a lie."

Salar thought about that a while. "Okay," he said. "So what?"

"What?"

"So what if it was a lie?" He waved his arm, getting angry himself. He was the sort of person whose anger was impressive, not because he was impressive, but because he never got angry. "Not that I believe it, but so what? Even if it was a lie for him, it was true for you."

"Nah. Sweetie, I was just tagging along for the ride. He was cute and he had a time machine, that's all." I was hoping if I was indifferent enough he'd just go away.

"_No it isn't._" He grabbed my shoulder. I could have thumped him one, but stopped myself. "You're not like that. What about all those stories you told me? About Kirk, and Spock? Would they give up?"

"Those were just stories." I'd been living with Salar and his family, when I stayed in the village. The kid had three fathers and two mothers and a shitload of siblings (apparently Avarinne marriage customs were either extremely complicated or extremely flexible, I wasn't sure which) and all of them were sweet enough to kill a diabetic elephant. I'd quickly decided that I wasn't ever, ever going to tell them about my family. About most of my life, really. So that left … _Star Trek._ "That's not real, either."

"So what?" said Salar again. "That's one of the things you learn when you're an apprentice shaman. Just because something never happened, doesn't mean it's not _true._ It just means you have to make it true."

"Oh, stop talking like a Hallmark card."

He scowled at me. "So you're just gonna sit there and watch the world end because everyone else is? Look, you told me the Doctor showed you a better way of living. You believed that. You believed in helping people. You don't _need_ the Doctor to keep believing that."

"Yeah, and I don't need my magic feather to fly, either. I'll just flap my ears and away I go."

He just gave me a baffled look.

"Okay, fine," I sighed. "Let's go see Threkian."

It wasn't that I wanted to go watch her die. It was just that I liked Salar too much to punch him, and going with him was the only other way to shut the little geek up.

Fate spared me. By the time we got back to the village, Threkian was already dead.

**25. Going Down With the Ship**

I drifted through the village, watching the funeral preparations. Actually, mostly I ended up watching other people drifting through the village. And other people packing up their stuff and getting the hell out of Dodge. Like rats leaving a sinking ship, except for, you know, already being underwater and all that.

Well, why not? Without Threkian, there was no reason to stay. Hell, there hadn't been any reason to stay while she was alive. She'd just sort of … convinced us.

With a start, I realized I didn't have any reason to stay, either. The Doctor wasn't coming back. I had to accept that. And maybe Threkian had been holding me here, too.

No reason to stay, and no reason to leave. As soon as my uncle had enough zordinite, this planet was toast. And if something stopped him … we were still toast. Just more slowly and painfully.

The only was out was with Jodafra.

I heard shouting, and followed it. On the edge of town, Salar was trying to talk some of the surviving warriors—or any surviving warrior—into helping him launch a desperate, romantically suicidal last assault on the Abode of Monsters. He made a ridiculous figure, a skinny, gangly guy hectoring a bunch of muscle-men, and being variously ignored or shoved out of the way.

"Hey," I said. "Shouldn't you be helping Plecthros with the funeral, or something?"

"Nobody would come," he snapped. "They're too busy RUNNING AWAY!"

On of the warriors gave him a particularly hard shove, even though he wasn't in anybody's way. I gave the jerk a lump on his jaw he wouldn't soon forget. He turned on me, and I smiled, and he backed off. The Istoi seemed to get nervous when I smiled too widely at them. My teeth are sharper than theirs.

"Anyway," said Salar, "Plecthros got stoned on this weird purple seaweed she bought off a trader last year, and she's passed out under her worktable. She won't come round for a few days. Now if you don't mind, I'm busy."

"Yeah?" I said dubiously. "And what are you doing?"

"I'm not going to stand by and watch. We're going to die anyway, we might as well die fighting. Don't try and talk me out of it. I'll go alone if I have to, but I'm going."

The thought of Salar going off to fight my uncle (and the various Beasts, and the Teroi, and probably a few stray Cybermen or whatever) was pretty pathetic. And a bit comical. And, weirdly, touching.

"I'll go with you," I said.

"I won't—" he said, arguing automatically before he realized what I'd said. His eyes popped. "You—you will?"

"Yeah." I shrugged. "Look, I guess I just didn't want to look stupid, believing in other people's lies. But if I go with you, we won't live long enough to look all that stupid. Besides, like you said, we're gonna die anyway. So I might as well come. At least this way I'll have an excuse to hit people."

A few byswimmers backed away from me. Yep, still got it.

**26. Magic Potion**

"So, uh … what do we do now?"

I rolled my eyes. Now that he'd got somebody to go with him, Salar couldn't figure out where to go. Oh, well. He was smart enough to ask for directions, which is more than you can say for most men—above or below water.

"Well, we have to get past the Beast of the Water first," I said. "You can't go my land—which is probably swarming with Teroi, anyway—and neither of us can swim through the pollution. Hey, you know, this could work out in our favor. The Teroi won't expect anybody to be able to get past the Beast without getting eaten. We can take them by surprise!"

"Oh?" he said. "But … we are going to get eaten. Aren't we?"

"Well, that would be the weak point in my cunning plan." I had my rifle, but it wasn't waterproof, so that was out. And the Beast seemed pretty resilient. Maybe … "Salar, your people use poisoned harpoons and things, don't they?"

"Well, yes." He frowned. "Plecthros has a number of potions. Some kill, others paralyze."

"Yeah, I know. You used one on me."

"But I don't know if our magic is strong enough to work on a demon."

"Sugar, I don't believe in demons."

"Oh. Uh, do the demons know that?"

"Oh, come on!" I grabbed his hand and started swimming for Plecthros' hut. "It's not a demon. I hate to tell you this, but it's just a mutated Istoi."

Apparently "mutated" didn't translate too well, but "Istoi" certainly did. "It was born of Istoi, but it's still a demon."

"Born of Istoi?"

Salar nodded and looked around nervously. "Not here. Wait till we're inside."

Plecthros had a large hut, filled with clay jars and carved bones. The high ceiling was of stone, with an air-bubble and shelves for storing things that had to be kept dry. The center of the room was dominated by a stone table. Plecthros was, indeed, passed out halfway under it—floating upside down with her legs sticking out. Unconsciousness underwater can get weird.

Salar went immediately to a shelf and grabbed a jar. "The killing poison?"

"Strongest you've got. So, where did this thing come from?"

He gave Plecthros one last look to check she was still out of it. "It is said that Threkian's sister, some years ago, was raped by a Teroi. She found herself with child, and she cursed it, and wished that if it was born that it would be born a monster. The gods cursed her for wishing such a thing on a child by making her wish come true."

"Okay, that doesn't even make sense. If she deserved to be cursed for _wishing_ it, why would the gods go and make it come true?" Yet another reason I don't believe in gods.

"I still think it's a demon."

"Well, there's only one way to find out. Go stick it with a poisoned harpoon. If it dies, I was right. If it eats us, I was wrong."

Salar considered. "All right," he agreed. "But if it eats us, I told you so."

**27. Magic Spell**

"I told you so," said Salar.

"It hasn't eaten us yet," I said.

"Yes, but I can't last much longer out of water. You might live a day or two more, but eventually we're going to either choke, or get back in the water. And then it will eat us."

This was, annoyingly, true. With all the flailing tentacles and claws and whatnot, it was harder than I'd expected to perforate the damned thing with a harpoon. We'd ended up beating a hasty retreat up onto a rock. The Beast circled us endlessly, occasionally rearing up and snapping one of its various mouthparts in our direction. It looked like it was going to stick around for days just out of spite, and Salar was already wilting in the heat.

"Can you see where the harpoon went?" I asked him.

"No." He started rooting around in his mesh pack. "I'm going to try a magic spell. I'll summon a spirit to help us."

"A magic spell? Great! You do that, I'll see if I can get this thing with my knife."

"Just give me a minute. Um—I've never actually done this before. Maybe you should stand back in case I summon … something else. By accident."

"Uh-huh." I stepped away from him and waited. Fortunately, I'd dipped a flint-bladed knife in the poison, and I'd managed to hold on to that. Unfortunately, it didn't have the reach of the harpoon, and I was likely to get eaten in the process of using it. Or before I could use it. I didn't believe in magic, but I was _not_ in a hurry to get back in the water.

Salar got out some lumps of colored clay and started tracing arcane symbols on the rock around him, muttering something vaguely Lovecraftian as he did so. Then he pulled out a small carved tusk and began waving it in the air, muttering more loudly.

"Look," I said at length, "how much longer is this gonna HOLY SHIT!"

"Gog-nagog-shaloth—what?" Salar said, looking up just in time to see what looked like a young, human or humanish woman falling out of thin air, where she'd appeared in a flash of light. "It worked! We got Something!"

The astonishment in his voice was not reassuring. He might have at least pretended to know what he was doing. Or what he'd gone and … summoned.

She didn't look like much more than a girl, a slight form in scruffy jeans and jacket and grimy white shirt, with unkempt hair the color of rust, and she landed with a yelp, on her arse in the shallow water over a patch of coral. In fact, she should have looked harmless—her skin shining white in the sun, with a few faint marks of discoloration, like she had a fever, her face fine-boned and almost delicate.

But her gaze was sharp and hard, and her jaw was set in a hard line. When she got to her feet, her movements had a suggestion of vitality to them, of strength and a coiled energy ready to spring into action. The fact that she'd just fallen out of the sky didn't seem to phase her at all.

Neither did the Beast, when it reared up in front of her. It towered above her head, tentacles whipping this way and that, jaws snapping and hissing.

A small, dark shape fell from roughly the same part of the sky as the girl. The Beast snatched it out of the air with a tentacle, fast as lightening, and leaned over its victim.

She gave it a mean-eyed, unblinking stare. "Give me back," she growled, "my damned hat."

And she punched it in the … nose-ish thing.

It jerked back in surprise before it lunged for her, which gave her just enough time to pull out what could either be a short sword, or, in the hands of someone over five feet, a large knife. She brought it down on a clawed appendage, and sparks flew.

Both combatants pulled back a moment, apparently surprised a) that the sword made any impact (the Beast) and b) that it didn't have more impact (the woman). Then they let out eerily similar roars, and went for each other.

"Stay here," I told Salar. "I'm going to see if I can stab that monster while it's distracted."

"Which one?" he asked.

Good question. The woman had been knocked down a few times, and was bleeding badly, but she didn't seem much bothered by it. And she was doing a bit of damage to her opponent, herself.

I slipped into the water, trying to swim past the thrashing tail of the Beast and find a gap in its scales. It wasn't easy, and I got whacked a few times, but I managed to get a good grip on its back while still carrying my knife. It was like a damned rodeo. At least the head end was distracted.

I stabbed for a patch of leathery skin. Up close, it looked unhealthy, with raw patches and clumps of the Avarinne equivalent of barnacles.

The knife bounced off, almost jarred out of my hand.

I tried pressing the tip of the flint against the skin. It still didn't want to cut through. The monster wasn't helping me, with all that thrashing. But it still didn't seem to have noticed me.

There was a ripping sensation under the knife, and the blade went in, and snapped off.

Oh, boy. _That_ got its attention.

The next few moments were a bit confusing. The Beast bucked me off, knocking me into a rock. I washed to the surface, disorientated, and I saw the Beast turn its head back away from me with a scream and go for the woman again, spraying blood from a severed eye-stalk.

She drove the sword into another eye to the hilt, yanked it out, swung it in a wide arc and chopped off the tentacle clutching her hat—which she managed to snatch out of the air and calmly flip onto her head while a last blow from the Beast sent her sailing off of the coral outcrop to land with a splash in the water beyond.

I scrambled out of the way as the monster turned again, but this time it wasn't interested in me. It was writhing in pain, perhaps trying to dislodge my knife, perhaps trying to ease its punctured eye. Either way, I was able to climb back up out of reach beside Salar while its motions gradually died down into twitches, and its coils sank beneath the waves.

"Is it dead?" asked Salar.

"Well, it's not trying to eat us. I think that's a good indication 'dead' in this case."

"Ain't dead yet, reckon it will be soon," said a voice from behind us.

We both jumped, and spun around to see the woman standing behind us. She was sopping wet, bedraggled, and had green creature-ichor dripping from her hat and running down her bruised face and mingling with her own red blood, livid against her pale skin. And she was grinning ear to ear under it.

"Er … thank you?" said Salar.

"Don't mention it, little brother," she said, wiping more ichor from her sword onto the sleeve of her jacket. The sword came away gleaming, like it repelled dirt. She examined the blade, which was made from some pale, shining metal inlaid with exotic script made out of what looked like rust, and slipped it back into the scabbard on her back.

"Now," she drawled, shoving her hands in her pockets and rocking back on her heels. Her voice was deeper than you'd expect for her size, with a hint of a growl in the back of it. "We ain't been introduced proper. You're Destrii, I s'pose, little sister. An' that'd make you … Salar, was it?"

"That's right," I said. Salar nodded.

"An' I am called by Arkeros," said the woman, pleasantly. "Cold Iron. Well, now we got that said, and if you'll kindly pardon my asking … what the _fuck?_"

"Well, we were fighting this sea monster," I said, resisting the urge to point to Salar and shout, _'He did it!_' "And we tried a magic spell. And you appeared. We didn't even think it would work."

"Uh, sorry," added Salar. "I hope we didn't inconvenience you. We won't do it again."

The woman gave a long, rolling shrug of her shoulders. "Ah, well. I was just tryin' t'find me way home, an' got all turned around in this here time paradox. S'pose that's how you two kids was able to pull me in—exploit the inherent instabilities of the dimensional flux, an' all. But s'all good. Bit of entertainment, anyway!"

She laughed, a deep, pure, throaty sound. I thought I liked her, but she made me a bit uneasy. She felt ancient, older than the Doctor at his most I-am-a-Time-Lord-I-walk-in-eternity spookiness, but her face and voice were young. She practically glowed with vitality, but her skin was pale as death. Up close, I could see her eyes were rimmed with something like rust, and the insides of her pale lips were stained dark with the same thing. It tinted her teeth, and the whites of her eyes, and bled into the green of her slit-pupiled irises. There were old rents and stains on her clothes, where the blood had dried black.

And her tone was friendly enough, but there was something off-kilter in her smile, something wild in her eyes. Something just a bit crazy.

I realized that, despite her size, I wouldn't have wanted to take her on in the Arena. Ever. I'd fought a lot of people I'd thought were insane, but now I realized they were just stupid, suicidal, or fooling themselves. Arkeros was the genuine article. I looked at her eyes glittering under the brim of her hat, and I knew she was the sort of person who'd take on anyone, any time. Not because she thought she'd win, or because she didn't care if she lived or died, but for the sheer _joy_ of the fight.

"Um, are you hurt?" asked Salar, very politely.

"Not to speak of."

"You're bleeding," he pointed out.

"Bit o' blood don't bother Cold Iron," she replied, with a rolling shrug. "Was't you what did that spell?"

"Um …" He glanced at me. "Yes. Sorry."

Arkeros didn't kill him. "That seaweed don't hold a thaumaturgic charge for shit," she told him, and pulled a lime out of her pocket. "Here. Plant the seeds out of this. I only ever use citrus for my spells."

I was starting to feel a bit left out of this conversation. "How do you know who we are?" I asked. "Are you a time traveler?" Maybe that would explain the weird vibe I got off of her.

"Nah," she said. "But _you_ are."

"Used to be," I corrected.

"An' shalt be again, little sister."

"Yeah." I looked away. Somehow, I didn't feel safe meeting her eyes while I was thinking about Uncle Jodafra.

"You don't think he'd go an' _leave_ you, now, do ya?" She sounded almost amused.

"The Doctor?" I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but I don't think I did a very good job of it. "He already has."

"Mayhap." Arkeros didn't sound terrible concerned. "I've come late from the Time War, an' saw him there."

"The Time War?" I asked. "Who's winning?"

"An unholy alliance of death, despair, treason, and sheer shit-fer-brains stupidity." She shook her head and made a face. "In short, entropy. Never did like the stuff. Or, if you wants to put it another way … nobody. Not even the Doctor." She sighed. "Ah, well. I've a message he gave me to pass on. You got that psychic paper on you?"

"Yeah." I dug in my pocket and pulled out the Doctor's psychic paper, safely wrapped in a plastic bag. I figured it was a small price to pay for being rescued from a sea monster. Being around Arkeros was making me polite. It was embarrassing.

"Give't here." She took it, bag and all, and slapped it to her forehead. "There! Next time you see that damn fool boy, you give 'im that."

"If I see him," I said. "You'll probably see him before I do."

"What, me? Nah." There was something a little sad in her eyes when she said that, wistful. "Cold Iron shan't see him, never again, though he might see Cold Iron. He'll have to find somebody else t'take his messages to himself. But you'll see him, little sister. Sooner than you think."

"Where are you going?" asked Salar.

"To my grave, most like." She started walking away towards the edge of the rock. "Give you one last bit of advice, little sister. In case you forgot. You already got the key."

I guess my expression showed how helpful I thought that was. Okay, so maybe I mumbled something under my breath. She had sharper hearing than I'd expected.

"Hey!" she called back. "What the fuck language'm I talkin', anyhow?"

She stepped off the edge of the rock and pitched forwards into another flash of light, vanishing before she hit the water.

I turned to Salar. "What the hell was that?"

"Demon," he said, as if it were obvious.

"Riiight."

**28. Magic Charm**

We got back in the water—Salar was getting desperate to wet his gills, and the Beast was floating belly-up. I figured that was as dead as it was going to get.

"I told you it wasn't a demon," I said.

"Yes, it was."

"No, it wasn't. It's dead, isn't it?"

"That's just because another demon killed it."

"Hey, I'm the one who stabbed it with a poisoned knife."

"Yes, but _she_ stabbed it with a magic knife. Magic trumps poison."

"Whatever."

I said goodbye to him in the last patch of deep water by the shore of the Teroi town. "Um, thanks," I said awkwardly.

"For what?"

"Oh, you know. Stuff." I'm really not good at this sort of thing.

"You mean like helping you fight the Beast, and inviting you to stay with my family, and—"

"Yeah, that stuff." Cheeky little geek. "I mean … for being my friend."

I haven't had a lot of friends in my life. On Oblivion, you don't make friends. You make allies, and you make enemies. I guess I never picked up the knack after I left. But Salar … just sort of stuck with me.

"You were a good friend," I finished, lamely.

"So were you." He moved closer, and gave me a clumsy kiss. "For luck. You talk like you're saying goodbye."

Oh. Like the Doctor.

I kissed Salar, glad we couldn't see each other's expressions clearly in the twilight. "Cos I like you," I said.

And I turned on my hologram, and turned for the beach.

The night air was cooler than the water, and it had that dead tang I'd tasted—even worse than last time. I didn't see any guards, but I crouched down in the stunted shrubbery, waiting for Salar to get into position and carry out his half of the plan, namely, creating a distraction.

He still had his seaweed, but he said he was going to try out the lime. (I'd had to tell him what it was.) He'd seemed a bit nervous. Well, I guess if you get Cold Iron on your first summoning, you sort of hesitate to try again.

Come to think of it, if the dimensional disturbances were worse closer to the Abode of Monsters, the 'spell' might be even more effective here.

While I was still trying very, very hard not to think about that, there was a massive CRACK! and a flash like lightening off on the other side of town, by the docks. Followed by shouting, screaming, and a noise like the granddaddy of all pissed-off elephants.

I gave the guards (if any) a few moments to get going in the right direction (and hoping none of them had the brains to run _away_ from whatever Salar had summoned) and started through the town in the direction of the Abode. The streets were deserted—everyone must be inside, hiding from those Beasts of Fire. It was damned eerie.

I was starting to wonder if the Beasts were even around, when I saw one at the end of a lane. I ducked behind a half-broken wall, hoping it hadn't seen me. Or that it would mistake me for somebody who was allowed to be out. How did they tell the difference between civilians and guards, anyway? Were they that bright?

It didn't react to my presence, just drifted aimlessly along the lane. Away from me, fortunately. This one had no humanoid features whatsoever. It was just a big, shimmering blob of dim red light.

At the end of the lane, it ghosted through a wall and vanished from sight. So I guess hiding indoors wasn't much protection. Maybe they were trained to only attack people outside.

I couldn't resist. I went down the lane and put my hand to the wall. It was cool to the touch, undamaged. The Beast must be so far out of phase, temporally, that it could pass through solid matter without affecting it.

I pulled my hand away and hurried off, keeping well away from any walls for fear a Beast might come out of them with no warning. I hoped they couldn't manage that through the ground.

I got beyond the houses and crested the hill that sloped down to the sea, and the Abode. Seen at night, the place was more spectacular than ever—a mass of pseudo-fire, shifting architecture and temporal fields. It lit up the sea around it with irregular flickers of red and gold light.

This was it. Time to face my uncle. Time to make a decision. See if I could do this all by myself.

I took a deep breath and steeled myself.

And felt the muzzle of a rifle press coldly against my spine.

"Well, well, well," came a voice out of the darkness. "What have we here?"

**29. Magic Ink**

I could have tried knocking the gun away. It would have been a risk, but better than being captured. But then I spotted more guards out of the corner of my eye—to many to take on.

I decided to wait and see if I got a better chance. The guards seemed determined to see that I didn't get one. They tied my hands and marched me away from both the Abode and the town, off to where the scrub became tall enough to almost get lost in.

And then I was pushed into a clearing where I was surrounded by guards on all sides. "Captain Rei! We've captured the woman Destrii! She was attempting to reach Jodafra!"

Damnit, did everybody know my name?

A figure stepped away from the small fire at the center of the clearing. I recognized the guard captain who'd met us at the docks when I'd come with the Doctor, what seemed like a lifetime ago. "Destrii, we meet again," he said. "Or Dessu, as you called yourself before. It seems you have many names."

"Shall we kill her?" asked one of the guards.

"Now wait a minute," I said. "I don't know what you've heard about me, but I'm on your side!" Although if dear Uncle had told them my name, he'd probably told them I was an assassin or something. "And if you kill me, Uncle Jodafra won't take it very kindly."

"You see! She claims him as kin!"

Rei held up a hand. "Peace. I think both of you are laboring under a misapprehension. Gorun, put that knife down." He turned to me. "Destrii—is it Destrii? We may be your uncle's guards—at least by day—but we only serve him in name. We want to end his rule as much as you do."

"Is that what he told you?" I asked. That was the only explanation I could think of.

"No," growled on of my captors. Gorun, I guess. He was still holding my arm—holding it hard enough to bruise, to make up for not being allowed to kill me. "He told us to let you through, to escort his favorite niece in safety."

"He what?" That threw me. Either Dearest Uncle was going soft, or … "He probably just wants the pleasure of killing me himself. It's not like he hasn't tried before."

"Likely enough to be true," said Rei. "He's a vicious brute. You should have gone to Ullan's inn last time, Destrii. He could have helped you and your friend."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Look, I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth … but how do you know I'm on your side?"

"Your friend showed me his magic paper," said Rei, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "At first, it appeared as a letter of identification. Then the words changed. They were foreign to me, but I could read them nonetheless. They said that your right name was Destrii, and your companion was the Doctor, and that you had come to help liberate us from the tyrant."

Psychic paper. Take that as a lesson never to use stationary smarter than you are. I don't know if it read Rei's mind and found out he was friendly, or if it was just a lucky guess—or if I should count that as a point for or against the Doctor. Men and their toys.

"Yes, of course," I said out loud.

"And then Ullan was killed by the Beasts of Fire, not three nights later," said Gorun. He was really digging his fingers into my arm. "She reported him. She—"

"Yeah?" I said. "So why'd it take three days, then? And why didn't I report you lot?" I broke his nose with my elbow, for emphasis. "And don't pinch, sweetie."

Rei pulled a couple of overeager guards away before I had a chance to kick any of them, and cut the ropes off my wrists. "Enough. Enough, I said. Both of you!" He looked momentarily amused as he pushed the bleeding Gorun away, but his face was grave when he turned back to me. "Ullan was well liked," he explained. "And he died an ugly death—even for a victim of a Fire Beast. It crushed his skull and burned him so badly we only knew him by his rings. But he was foolish—he spoke too much, especially when he drank, and I know for a fact that a spy of Jodafra stayed at his inn the night before he died."

"Uh-huh," I said. "Yeah, the Doctor said those things were dangerous."

"But you have powerful magic!" said Rei, becoming enthusiastic. Oh, boy. "You braved the streets at night. And you distracted Jodafra's loyal guards with the great purple demon you summoned!" He paused. "It was you that summoned it, was it not?"

"Friend of mine," I said. I wished I'd gotten a good look at whatever it was—and I hoped it hadn't eaten Salar. "Purple, huh?"

See? There _are_ other colors than green!

"Yes. Can you not use your magic against the Fire Beasts? That is how Jodafra controls them—with a magic key."

"Hate to disappoint you, sweetie," I said. "But I specialize more in hitting things. Things that … can be … hit …"

"What is it?" he asked.

A very interesting thought had just occurred to me. It made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Or a lot of sense. Or something.

It made even more sense if you assumed that a) Jodafra was a born liar and b) the Doctor had gotten things completely wrong. Both of which I should have been taking for granted all along.

"Has anybody," I asked, "ever actually seen a Fire Beast attack someone?"

There was a murmur of unrest from the guards. "We've seen the bodies!" one of them shouted. "We've all seen what they do!"

"Yeah, you've seen the bodies, but did you ever see a Fire Beast kill somebody?"

"I haven't," said Rei, thoughtfully. "I see what you're suggesting. They attack only at night, after curfew, when the townsfolk are indoors and the guards are restricted to certain patrols. But what else could cause such burns?"

"Your guns burn things, right?" I said.

"Yes, but not the same way as the Fire Beasts."

"But where do you get your guns?"

Long pause there.

"From Jodafra."

Longer pause.

"He'll have other weapons," I said. "And I know for a fact that he's an expert at breaking bones with that walking stick of his. That _electric_ walking stick."

They didn't know what the word 'electric' meant, but I was able to explain enough that they got the gist of it.

"So … we've been living in fear of the Beasts for nothing?" asked Gorun, skeptically. "How do we know this isn't a trick?"

"Look, do you want to kill Jodafra or not?" I demanded.

"We do," said Rei. "He's killed our friends and neighbors, poisoned our land with his wells, made us into his slaves. But there are many guards loyal to him, and he has powerful weapons, and he has much magical protection. He can walk in the fires of the Abode where mortals burn and die. He spends much time there, now—there have been attempts on his life, and he's found that even the weapons he's given us won't penetrate those flames."

I grinned—the grin the Doctor said made me look like a shark, when I wasn't wearing my hologram. "Oh, I think I know a way around that, sweetie."

**30. Magic Trick**

The sun was just coming up, not yet over the horizon but lighting the sky, when I walked with Captain Rei down the barren hillside to the shore that faced the Abode of Monsters. It was almost pretty against the dim pearly gray of the sky—with flames of soft coral, rose, and lemon-yellow. Or it would have been pretty, if the way time was flickering back and forth didn't make me seasick to watch.

I'd taken off my hologram, which had startled Rei and his friends no end. But I wanted to do this wearing my own face, and there wasn't much point to disguise now.

The Beasts of Fire were swarming around the Abode. Every Beast there was must be home—assuming you could even count them. As I watched, several of them met and merged into one, no larger but more clearly defined than its component parts. It looked much more humanoid now.

"Lord Jodafra!" called Rei.

Jodafra appeared from a flickering doorway in the Abode, which vanished behind him. Flames danced around him, ruffling his fur but leaving him untouched, and the Beasts dogged his heels.

"Ah, Destrii!" he said. "So you've come back to me. Thank you, Captain, for bringing my niece home."

His voice was warm, welcoming. So familiar.

"I want to stay with you," I said. "If you'll have me, Uncle."

"Of course, dear Niece." He smiled tenderly at me and began to descend the melted stairs of the Abode towards us. I could see the gold charm around his neck. It did look a little like a key—melted and bent, but possibly something that had started life as a key. Up close, Uncle Jodafra looked a little less than his best, too. Like he'd spent too many years living on a dead-end stone-age planet at the back of beyond, and he now had to work at caring what happened next. "We shall travel the stars together, once more, and—"

"You'll travel nowhere, you devil!" growled Rei. And he leveled his rifle at my uncle.

So far, according to plan.

I spun around, knocking the rifle from his grip and sending the shot wild. He stared at me in surprise, and I pulled a flint knife from my belt and drove it into his chest to the hilt.

"Oh, dear," said Jodafra. "How tiresome."

"Yeah," I said. I yanked out the knife, and Rei sank to his knees, clutching his chest and mouthing something soundlessly. It could have been, _But I trusted you,_ but I really didn't care.

Then he pitched forward, and lay still on the ground in a spreading pool of blood. I bent and wiped my knife on his shirt. Homicide is a messy business.

"Of course," Jodafra went on, "energy weapons won't penetrate the energy field of the Abode."

"I thought they might not," I said. "But why take chances? I want to get off this miserable rock. Oh, by the way, a bunch of Rei's men are in on it. They've got a resistance cell camped out in the hills."

"Thank you." Jodafra raised a brow-ridge in amusement. "I suppose you played along with him and killed the ringleader at my feet as a peace offering?"

"Well …"

"Hm. How terribly dramatic of you. But I assure you, there's no need. You are my flesh and blood. I wouldn't dream of leaving you behind in this terrible place."

"The Doctor would," I said. I didn't even try to keep the bitterness out of my voice. "He's gone. Left without me."

"You can't trust anyone these days, can you?" he said. "Now, if you'd be so kind to throw aside that knife. I regret as much as anyone the circumstances under which we parted. But what's done can't be undone, and I'd much prefer to make this reconciliation … unarmed."

"You throw away your stick first," I said. "And tell those pets of yours to back off."

"Very well." He tossed the stick away. One of the Beasts caught it, and it ignited into flames and crumbled, a mass of cinders.

I jumped. I hadn't expected that. This was not good. Maybe they were stronger near the Abode, strong enough to interact with the physical world.

"I'm afraid I can't send the Beasts away," he apologized. "You see, they're not strictly my pets. They're simply residents of the Abode. They follow me about—perhaps they like me. Or perhaps they're hoping that I'll misplace my key," he touched the golden thing around his neck, "and they'll have a nice snack. They've been of some use to me, though—kill a few peasants, leave burns on the bodies and blame the Beasts, and suddenly I've got an entire race on its knees in superstitious awe."

"That's all I needed to know," I said, and jumped into the flames.

I think it was the only time in my life I'd ever seen my uncle surprised. Really surprised, not faking it. He was the sort that usually arranged surprises for other people, the sort that arranged … everything. But despite his shock, he brought up the knife he'd had hidden in his sleeve.

I parried it, and slashed at his stomach, which he blocked in turn. He'd slowed down a little. Not enough for me to win in a knife-fight, perhaps, but enough for what I had in mind.

I reached up and snatched the golden key from around his neck.

The Beasts crowded forward. Jodafra screamed, clawing for the key, and I slashed at his knife-hand. He dropped his weapon. His fur was burning, his eyes going milky and cloudy. "Dest—" he began.

I didn't give him time to finish, or time for the circling Beasts to finish him for me. I drove my knife into his heart. I felt a crack, like the blade had broken, but that was all right. I wouldn't be using it any more.

I left it in his chest, and he fell at my feet, dead before he hit the ground. For all his cleverness, the last expression in his eyes was as baffled and uncomprehending as any musclehead I ever killed in the Arena.

The Beasts growled and shuffled around me. I held up the key, and they backed up—a little.

"So you didn't have to," I told them. They didn't seem very grateful.

They didn't seem interested in Jodafra anymore, either. I didn't know if that was because he no longer had the key, or because he was dead. And soon there wouldn't be much left of him, anyway. The flames of the Abode were consuming his corpse.

"Destrii, are you all right?"

I turned to see Rei sitting up, pulling out the bladder of fish-blood from under his tunic and grimacing at the mess. "Fine. How about you?"

"You nicked my arm a bit, but I'm fine." He'd strapped the bladder to his side, and I'd stabbed into his shirt between his chest and his arm. It's surprisingly effective, if the audience is standing at the right angle. Amazing what you can learn from DVD extras—thank you, Hollywood. "Don't those flames burn you?"

I'd all but forgotten the fire, thought it was washing like a warm breeze over my skin. "No, not at all." I pulled my TARDIS key out of my shirt. It shimmered with rainbow light in the flames of the Abode. "Like I told you, I have my own key."

"And such a small thing. It must have very powerful magic."

"That's debatable."

"Then how—"

"Rei," I said, "what language am I speaking?"

He gave me a very strange look, as if trying to figure out if that was a rhetorical question, or if I'd just lost my mind. "Brokolyn, of course."

"Never heard of it." I shook my head. "Broccolin? Sounds like a vegetable. Look, I have to go … do some stuff. If I don't come back, my friend Salar is waiting for me by the western docks. Go tell him what happened, yeah? Oh, and be nice to him. He's got a lime, and apparently he knows how to use it."

"All right. Where are you going?"

"Inside."

I turned, and walked towards the Beasts. They parted before the key, letting me through, and I walked through a door that appeared in the melting walls and into the heart of the Abode of Monsters.

**31. Magic Key**

I walked through the twisting hallways of the Abode, the Beasts marching sedately ahead and behind me like some sort of victory parade. This was the calmest I'd ever seen them.

Now and then, several of them would merge. Their number steadily decreased as we went along, their shape becoming more and more clearly bipedal. None of them tried to touch me.

We walked through mists and sheets of flame, through wreckage and rubble, through blackened ashes and vast cracked empty plains. Sometimes our surroundings were flickering and translucent as the flames themselves. Sometimes they were solid and stable, but never for long.

Once, we passed through a black void, walking over a narrow bridge of fire.

_What language am I speaking?_

It was an obvious question. In retrospect, I felt pretty stupid for not having figured it out before. I mean, how stupid and lazy and self-obsessed did I get after the Doctor left, that I didn't see?

Wrong question. That assumed he had left Avarinne. And maybe he had, but he'd come back, long, long ago.

I caught a glimpse of blue wood paneling, oozing into existence in the flames before blackening and crumbling away. Roundels sinking into the walls, then filling in, then sinking again, like they were breathing.

At last, we came to a great round chamber where the walls were relatively corporeal and the flames were streaming inwards, like water spiraling down a drain, into a hexagonal mass at the center. The Beasts took up positions in a ring around it, leaving a gap for me. There were thirteen of them.

On the misshapen hexagon, on the side facing me, a keyhole appeared.

I looked at the Beasts. The TARDIS key was protecting me from the fire, or maybe it was the TARDIS itself—maybe it recognized me, and the key was just one more magic feather I didn't need. Certainly, the key hadn't protected me from anything in the past. Only the gold key would stop the Beasts, then—the key that had stopped them from killing my uncle.

My uncle. For a long, long time—for most of my life—the only person I loved, the only person I'd trusted. And he had used me all my life. And he'd turned on me in an instant.

And I'd turned on him.

If I couldn't trust my own uncle, if he couldn't trust me, if we couldn't see through each other's lies—how could I trust a Beast?

They waited patiently, watching me. I could almost see faces on some of them, all different.

"All right," I said.

I took the key, and put into the keyhole.

It flashed gold, and crumbled to dust. But the flash of gold didn't fade. It spread over the hexagon, solidifying it as it went. The stream of fire into the room sped up. The walls firmed up, straightened, and stopped flowing.

The Beasts began to walk around the console. But not towards me—towards each other. Or rather, _into_ one of them. Eight on my left walked clockwise into the ninth, on by one, and the four on my right walked counter-clockwise and did the same.

With each form that vanished into him, he became more solid, more distinct. By the time the last form had entered him, he had stopped glowing, and become a flesh-and-blood man. He was terribly burned, and dressed in the tatters of scorched rags, and he fell to the scorched floor of the TARDIS with a cry.

He was very still, and didn't move when I touched him—which should have been agonizingly painful if he was conscious. There wasn't an inch of skin that wasn't blackened and cracked. But his pulse was strong.

Both pulses.

Exactly as I'd expected.

"Doctor?" I said.

**Coming Soon—Epilogue: **_**Salvation**_


	5. Epilogue: Salvation

**Epilogue: **_**Salvation**_

**32. Where I End and You Begin**

" … Destrii?"

I dropped the remote at the sound of that not-yet familiar voice. It hit the water with a splash. I almost fell out of the seat myself.

He was standing in a patch of sunlight, wrapped in a sheet, water almost up to his knees. First time out of bed—first time conscious, actually, and if it wasn't for the fading scars of his burns you'd never know anything had been wrong with him. Some things never changed.

A lot of other things, of course, could and did change.

He frowned at the sound of his own voice, shook his head. His accent had changed completely. I didn't like it.

"Doctor?" I said. I got up and went over to him. "It's you, right?"

He gave me that _look_--that why-do-I-put-up-with-these-mindless-inferior-species look. His eyes were still blue, clear and bright. For a moment, they looked the same as always.

"Yeah. It's you," I said.

He continued looking at me. No, his eyes weren't the same. Still blue, but a shade grayer, and harder. They used to be so warm, so open. Now they were like fields of ice, and he looked at me like I was someone he used to know, a long time ago, and didn't anymore.

Then he looked away, staring at the control room. It was a bit of a sight. After I'd put the key into the console, the TARDIS had stabilized—but it had still been badly damaged. The flames left it a melted wreck, and it had slumped down into the sea, which flowed into it.

It had been healing, just like the Doctor. The interior walls had straightened, the exterior shrinking down. The spaces that let in the sunlight (it had seemed to want the sun at first, like a plant) were gradually closing. You could see splinters of blue wood scattered over it, drawing together. I gave it another week, two at the outside, before it turned back into a police box.

What the inside was turning into, I wasn't so sure. It seemed to have decided it preferred its new marine habitat to life on land, and had gone into a sort of coral theme. I didn't know if it would get over it or not, but I thought the Doctor was going to have to get used to it.

I hadn't really gotten used to it. Didn't want to. I liked it, but it didn't really feel like home anymore.

"What … happened?" he asked. His voice was a lot rougher than it used to be. Not so much hoarse or gravelly, but hard, flinty as his eyes, verging on aggressive.

"You regenerated."

That look again. And a sour smile. "Yeah, thanks, Destrii, figured that out."

"Does regeneration always make you this sarcastic?"

"Some lives more than others." He peered at the surface of the water, trying to see his reflection in the seafoam. "So what happened in here? You been redecorating, or what?"

"What happened?" I asked, returning his sarcasm. I'm good at sarcasm. "Well, let's see. You ditched me, and then apparently you went and crashed your TARDIS about a century ago. Apart from that, you'll have to tell me."

"Oh," he said. He didn't seem interested in telling me anything.

This was awkward. I'd been waiting for him to wake up, coming in and watching him while he slept, seeing his new face emerge from its injuries a little at a time. He'd had the face of a poet before, or a painter. Now he looked like a thug, a hardcase, somebody who'd sell you stolen engine parts out of the back of his skimmer, or break your knees if you asked him where they came from. His wild hair had all burned away, giving him a shaven-headed look, with dark stubble just growing in.

He didn't look or sound like himself. Not one little bit.

"How are you?" I asked. I found it a little hard to care about the answer. He was too different, a stranger. Too different even to be a painful reminder of his former self. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah. I'm always all right, me. Bit of a rough time of it, this go round." He waded forward, touching some of the controls. "Blimey, this is a mess."

"I had to repair some of it to get the DVD player working. It didn't even have a monitor."

He looked at the screen I'd wired in. "What're you watching? _Star Trek?_ Y'know, for a show about interracial harmony, there's an awful lot of fightin'. I'd of thought it'd remind you too much of the Arena."

I shrugged. "Spock's in heat and Kirk takes his shirt off. What more could a girl ask for?"

I fished the remote out of the water. Ruined. That was the drawback of a semi-submerged spacecraft. The Doctor (I still had trouble thinking of him that way) wandered over and sat on the jump seat.

"Where'd you get all this stuff, anyhow?" he asked.

"Crashed spacecraft, some of it. The Time-Storms stopped after I put the key in the console, but apparently we still have a dimensional rift. Stuff falls through it."

He nodded. The old Doctor would have to get all moody to go quiet like that, have to see some horror or moral outrage. He'd work himself into some highly sentimental pit. This man just brooded casually.

"Found the _Salvation,_" I said. "Jodafra had it out on the hillside, build a few walls onto it and used it as a house. I got it working again. Me and Rei and Salar have done a bit of traveling. Just local trips, you know. Got a ways into the future and bought some stuff for the repairs."

"Where is Jodafra, anyway?" he asked, grimacing.

I hesitated a moment. "He's dead. I used the TARDIS key, jumped into the fire after him. He wasn't expecting that. I got the gold key off him, stabbed him before he could burn to death."

I looked down, scuffed my feet on the sand that lined the floor. A couple of tiny fish darted away from the disturbance in the water. But the Doctor didn't say anything. When I looked up, he didn't even look disappointed in me. "He said he'd take me back. I don't know if he meant it, or if it was just a trick. I think that's why he let me get so close—he trusted me. I keep wondering … if I'd agreed to go with him, if he really would have taken me back?" Then, immediately, "Nah. He was a monster. He didn't love anybody but himself. Didn't know how."

"I don't know about that," mused the Doctor. For a moment he sounded a little like his old self, and I felt a strange pang. Not of relief, but of grief. "I think monsters are just as capable of love as anyone else. But in the end, they always kill what they love. That's what makes them monsters."

"I didn't exactly have a choice," I said, stung. "He was trying to blow up the planet, remember?"

His eyes had gone pensive, and now they cleared, startled. "What?"

"Jodafra. I didn't have a choice."

"Oh. No, I s'pose you didn't. Knowin' Jodafra." Apparently he'd been thinking of someone else who'd killed what they loved. I remembered suddenly that he'd just come from some sort of Time War. "How did you know the key would protect you?" he asked.

"I didn't."

"Oh." And then, "You were very brave."

"I guess. Took me about a month of sitting around feeling sorry for myself first. So what was that gold key?"

"It was the Great Key. The Key of Rassilon," he told me. "Or what was left of it. Gone, now, I think."

"Yeah, it turned to dust right after I used it."

"Everything turns to dust. Sooner or later."

A grim silence fell.

"How was Jodafra controlling the Beasts?" he asked, at length. He didn't sound like he really wanted to know. He referred to them in the third person, not acknowledging their identity.

I smiled and rolled my eyes. "He wasn't."

He gave me a look of such horror that I smacked him on the arm. Maybe not the best thing for a recovering invalid, but really, if he was that stupid, maybe he didn't deserve to live.

"Ow!"

"They didn't do anything, you idiot," I laughed. "It was Jodafra, sneaking around at night with that damned electrified walking stick. Just one huge scam to keep the peasants in line. You never killed anyone."

"Oh." I almost smacked him again for the gormless relief on his face. Then his expression darkened. "Not in this life, anyway."

"The war," I asked. "What happened?"

He turned those cold eyes on me. I couldn't read him anymore. Not in this body.

"I'm tired," he said. "I'm still recovering from the regeneration. I'm going to go get some sleep."

**33. Home**

He hung around a week and a half, working on the TARDIS, wandering around the town staring at everything like he'd never seen it before. I guess he hadn't, not with those eyes.

He seemed unfocused. Drifting. But angry, underneath it, restless and reckless, like a storm brewing and looking for a place to happen. Dangerous. I'd never seen my old Doctor like that, so damaged and without direction.

It worried me. If something didn't change, somebody was going to get hurt sooner or later, I could tell. Probably him, possibly everybody.

I still felt … almost nothing, when I looked at him. I missed my Doctor, but he seemed disconnected from this stranger. And a stranger he remained; he was too distant for me to get to know him quickly. Or maybe I wasn't trying very hard.

That was good, in a way. Meant my choices would be easier.

The town was changing. We were becoming a center of commerce. Without the Storms, and with the pollution starting to dissipate (with a bit of help from some future-tech) the stuff we salvaged from the dimension rift was a major draw to traders.

"How long has it been?" asked the Doctor.

"Since I used the key? About a year."

He stared at me in disbelief.

"I didn't want to move you at first," I said. "You were so badly hurt. And then all this water came pouring in, and washed you away. I tried to catch you, but by the time I caught you up, you'd sort of … grown into the wall. Sort of like a coral cocoon."

He'd seemed peaceful enough in there, so I'd left him—figured the TARDIS knew best and trying to break him out would do more harm than good. The amethyst seawater had gone sluicing through the time machine, like blood coursing through a body. There was something wholesome about Avarinne water (when it wasn't polluted) and it seemed to provide a good environment for healing. Like it washed away sins or something.

If you wanted to get poetical about it.

Eventually, the cocoon had cracked open of its own accord, mutating into a rough bunk. I'd stuck close for a few days, expecting him to wake up at any moment. He'd waited until I'd started to let my guard down, gave me a surprise.

"The locals didn't know what to think at first. But Captain Rei took over things here. And the Long Kelp People got themselves together and found a new leader, and Salar talked him into making peace with Rei. I guess I helped a bit. I have a reputation as a ferocious demon-slaying sorceress, now." I looked at him sideways, judged his mood. "How long for you?"

"Maybe a hundred years. Dunno." He gave a short, abrupt shrug. A lot of his gestures were like that nowadays. "Time was confused."

"Cos of the Time War?"

"What's that … purple thing?" he asked, pointing out over the town.

"Arcturan brontosaurus," I said. "I had to look it up in the _Salvation's_ databanks."

"Purple," he muttered, to the saurian or to the universe in general. "Why's it always purple? There're other colors out there, y'know."

"Oh, shut up. Could be worse. Could be green. Hey. That reminds me …"

"What?"

I smiled. "I'll be right back."

I ran to the edge of town, down by the docks where the _Salvation_ was parked. It only took me a moment to find what I wanted.

The Doctor looked at me strangely when I handed him the leather jacket. "You left that for me," I reminded him. "But it didn't quite fit. Anyway, Avarinne doesn't really have the climate for it."

He just held it for a moment, unsure of what to do with it.

"Go on, put it on," I said, rolling my eyes. "I've seen the faces you make at those Teroi clothes."

He was wearing a rough, colorless sleeveless tunic I'd found locally, and a pair of dark trousers and shoes from the _Salvation._ (There weren't any shirts there that fit him.) He was Not Happy with the ensemble, and kept muttering about restocking the TARDIS wardrobe first chance he got. And I'd noticed him sometimes raise his hands, and then lower them, confused, as if he meant to tug on nonexistent lapels.

He put the jacket on. It looked good on him. He wasn't a bad-looking man, despite the overlarge nose and sticky-out ears. His hair was growing in a bit, and the scars had all but vanished. I had no desire whatsoever to kiss him. I couldn't imagine him in a green velvet jacket, or a blue velvet jacket, or velvet, period. He was not a velvet kind of guy. He was a leather kind of guy.

"And psychic paper," I said, holding it up. He reached for it, and I pulled it away. "That brontosaurus?"

"Yeah? What about it?" he asked.

"Salar summoned it up. With a lime."

The Doctor's eyes went wide.

"We got it off this crazy woman called Arkeros," I continued. I'd found a Teroi farmer to plant the seeds for Salar, and we had some nice saplings going. It was probably not a safe thing to do. I mean, the brontosaurus was mostly harmless (except for that one time it stepped on somebody's house) but who knew what Salar might manage next? "She left you a message. On the paper."

I held out the paper. He took it, very gingerly, like he didn't really want it any more. "Did you read it?" he asked.

"No."

"I'm not the only one who's changed, then. You're developin' a sense of restraint."

"It was blank when I looked at it," I retorted.

"I ran into her, you know," he said, holding the paper as if it might bite him. "During the War. Got her killed."

"She looked lively enough when I saw her."

He shook his head. "Oh, she's fine at the moment. But now her brother has the weapon he'll use to kill her." He looked up at me, and his eyes were bleak. "That's the burden of time travel. Finding out all those unexpected consequences, from harmless little things you've done."

He visibly braced himself and flipped open the leather to read Arkeros' last goodbye. He'd always used to hate goodbyes, and it looked like that was one thing that hadn't changed. I wondered which he was more afraid of—blame, or forgiveness?

He read. He stared in disbelief. He scowled. "Of all the--!" he sputtered. "Not again!"

"What?" I asked. He didn't seem too pissed, just … astonished, and somewhat annoyed. It was the most animated I'd seen him in this life.

He handed me the paper. It read:

_Doctor—met a future incarnation (10__th__ or 11__th__, I think) who gave me a message to pass on. "Earth about to be destroyed by Nestene. Go to Henrik's Department Store, 26__th__ March 2005, posthaste!" So MOVE ASS and save that planet, kid!_

It was signed with an ornate squiggle in a language both the paper and the TARDIS refused to translate. I somehow managed not to laugh.

She'd given him a damned "to do" list.

"Can't they go five minutes without getting themselves invaded?" griped the Doctor. "Look, this has to be sorted out."

"I'm not going," I said.

"Fine, I'll come back for you," he said distractedly. "I warn you, the shape the old girl's in, I don't know _when_--"

"I'm staying on Avarinne," I said. He looked at me, finally listening to what I was saying. "Look, I've got my own time machine now. I've got two cute guys who are impressed I've got a time machine, and aren't jealous of each other. I've got a planet covered in tropical beaches. And somebody has to keep an eye on that dimensional rift. All sorts of things are popping in and out, and nobody here knows how to deal with it."

He just stared at me. For a moment, I was afraid he was going to argue. I didn't want that. This was hard enough as it was. I worried about him—I could see he needed something, but I didn't know _what_ he needed, just that it wasn't me. Maybe Arkeros had known, and given it to him—a planet to save. Cos he was pissed off about it, grumpy as hell, but I could see all of a sudden he had a direction to go in.

"You're gonna settle down, in a tropical paradise, with two guys and a time machine?" he asked. "Savin' the world?"

"Yeah. That's about it."

He grinned then, wild and bright and toothy. It was a startlingly Doctorish grin.

"Fantastic!"

The End!

Now for Pete's sake, will somebody review this thing? Please?


End file.
